The Wide World of eCommerce Fulfillment
The retail landscape has been undergoing a massive transformation for the past decade. Online purchases have hit an all-time, with consumers purchasing $517.36 billion worth of goods and services online with U.S. merchants in 2018. This is a 14.2% increase over 2017, showing that it’s not about to go away any time soon.
Although, with total retail sales in 2018 at $3.628 trillion, eCommerce is still only 14.2% of overall retail purchases. In 2017, eCommerce represented only 12.9% of retail purchases. So this shift of 1.3% to eCommerce this past year is a sign that eCommerce is continuing to grow. Although we may feel that eCommerce has already taken over all retail, these statistics still show that eCommerce has a lot of room for growth.
With the ease of setting up shopping carts, payment programs, and small parcel shipping services, it’s never been easier for products to find their way to consumers by way of alternate channels rather than traditional brick and mortar retail stores. This shift in purchasing has a massive impact on the supply chain and creates new opportunities for 3rd party providers to get involved in this modern-day gold rush.
Consumers have put a huge emphasis on convenience, where they can order products from the comfort of their home or on-the-go from their phone and they know the items will be delivered directly to them as quickly as they need it.
The 3PL industry appears to be the primary benefactors of this eCommerce shift as many merchants and marketers have products to sell, but they don’t have elaborate logistics supply chains to move the products to the consumers. 3PL Warehouses provide the storage and services to fulfill these orders on-time and with greater accuracy. But most 3PLs aren’t stopping there, by providing a slew of value-added services, such as Backorder Management and Returns Processing, they can increase their value and create long-lasting business partnerships.
Are you fulfilling online orders from shopping carts? Are you expecting 100s, 1000s or 10,000s of orders per day? Are you stuck wondering how to process all of those orders efficiently and accurately? This blog and downloadable eBook will walk through the key concepts of eCommerce fulfillment for a 3PL, and discuss the decisions that will need to be made to implement an efficient process flow.
Feel free to click here to access the download page for the full eBook or check back as we post regularly.