The clear advantage of using a third-party logistics (3PL) company to outsources fulfillment is that it saves you from having to do the work yourself. But there is a deeper advantage, outsourcing warehousing and fulfillment can have a meaningful impact on your business’s growth.
Avoid long-term leases
Source: Clark Logistic Services
Many logistic companies offer adjustable pricing. This means they’ll be able to adjust to your needs and costs accordingly as you grow or go through slow period. Renting your own warehouse mostly requires more of a commitment.
Bring on the experts
Source: Cole Reports
When you hire an outsourced fulfillment services provider, you’re not only get a warehouse space, but also people who will be responsible for running the fulfillment center. When you fulfill and ship your won orders, you’ll likely need to hire your staff as you expand. Managing staff takes time. If your business is still constantly changes, you may be wary of promising someone a job. Instead, you can outsource the work to a logistics company and let them be responsible for finding and hiring good people.
Each 3PL has a whole team of logistics experts and support staff who will always be there to help you along the way. They maintain all of the labor needed for receiving, inventory management, and order processing and shipping, giving you an advance agility you might not achieve easily on your own.
Use your time to optimize
Source: Time and Date
It is very likely that you don’t start a business just because you are good at packing boxes. Your time is better used to manage and optimize your company, not stuck in the logistics of order fulfillment. When you let someone else handle your logistical details, you can focus on the things that have a greater impact on your bottom line.
Be more agile
Although doing it yourself is mostly free, it can actually cost you in the long run. Consumers mostly expect faster shipping times, doing it in-house less likely meet their expectations and deliver a bad customer experience. Partnering with a 3PL for fulfillment services can benefit you from their effectiveness and buying power leverage on packaging and shipping costs. Some even update you with a real-time stock level and status so you can be proactive.
This extra time can give you and your team to test new strategies, inventory management techniques, and other strategies to achieve rapid growth without worrying about back-end logistics or hiring backlogs.
Warehousing, shipping, and fulfillment can’t be separated when you begin to establish an e-commerce business or selling products.
Even though making sells is always the exciting part, you need to make sure your products end up in customers’ hands.
There are three options you can choose to make this happen:
Sell your product through a drop-shipper who will place orders for you
Place your order independently
Collaborate with a logistics company that will handle your warehousing and fulfillment
There are certain advantages from packing and shipping your own orders: it’s cheap and flexible. Often times, businesses that are just starting out, and businesses that have extra packaging needs, usually handle their own logistics.
And regardless of age or industry, any business struggling with cash flow will be better off handling things in-house. Sometimes you have more time to spend than money.
But if your business has expanded and growing quickly so you have the cash on hand to outsourced, you may consider for using third-party warehousing and fulfillment.
There are many logistics companies that will store your product and take care of packing and shipping your orders, but not all logistics companies provide fulfillment services such as AsiaCommerce.
But What is fulfillment service?
A fulfillment service is a third-party warehouse that prepares and ships your orders for you. It does this from its fulfillment center. E-commerce fulfillment services are ideal for businesses that don’t want to deal with shipping or have outgrown existing warehousing capabilities to a point where they’re unable to ship orders themselves anymore.
If you’re scaling fast and looking to optimize your fulfillment strategy, working with a provider that offers a central view of your data and smart inventory allocation across multiple warehouses will give you the most flexibility. To learn more about the AsiaCommerce fulfillment services, visit us here
What does a fulfillment center do?
Source: All Things Supply Chain
While each fulfillment center operates slightly differently, they all accomplish the same thing: they act as a command center for all your order prepping and shipping needs. Fulfillment centers also double as warehouse spaces for inventory storage, allowing you to hold onto product.
Some fulfillment service providers have multiple fulfillment centers, allowing them to serve different geographic locations more quickly than if they were to have just one. This allows e-commerce companies to deliver fast and affordable shipping to a diverse customer base.
What do fulfillment services cost?
Source: Shipware
Fulfillment services typically charge by the hour or per unit/pallet. Providers add up costs for receiving, storage, pick and pack, shipping, kitting or bundling, returns, custom packaging, gift services, and setup. They then apply transactional (e.g., receiving, shipping) and recurring (e.g., storage) fees.
If your business has big goals, fluctuating sales, but not enough time to take care of things in-house, AsiaCommerce will help you! Just fill the form here
As a businessman who works in the field of e-commerce, you certainly want a lot of people to be interested in visiting the website created by you and buy the products that you sell. And to do that, you need some strategies like SEO techniques that are reliable, and the most important is to map the prospective buyer. Mapping of potential buyers is very important to ensure the sustainability of the site that you created. One method that can be done to attract prospective buyers efficiently and appropriately is to build a buyer persona. What is a buyer persona?
The buyer persona is a representation of your ideal customer you’ve made through thorough research and by using the data that you get from your current customers that include demographic data, patterns of behaviour, motivations and objectives. The more you have detailed descriptions of your buyer persona, the greater your chances of making products that are needed for your business standing.
And in building the right buyer persona you can’t do it haphazardly, here are some tips that can help you build an effective buyer persona.
Buyer Persona: A Guide On How You Efficiently Target the Right Customer
1. Identify The Questions You Would Ask
The first thing you should do in building a good buyer persona is to provide basic questions but detailed that will be asked to the people who will be interviewed. In this case, it helps if you break down these questions into three categories, namely category of personal background that includes their demographic circumstances, such as marital status, income per year and where they live. This category also includes educational background as well as their career path.
The second category is the background of the company where they work. Ask detailed questions to them about the environment they work, such as the focus areas of the company as well as how big the company they work (can be seen from the number of employees, etc.).
The third category is their role in the field of work they pursue, and the challenges they face and their hopes and goals that they hold in performing their daily tasks.
The fourth category is the life of a virtual world that they pursue. As from where they receive a wide variety of current news, blogs they often visit and organisations or social networks in which they participate.
And a fifth category is the habit of shopping they do. Such as how they interact with the seller, and whether they use the internet service in the purchase of such products, as well as when they did their last purchase.
2. Sort Out The Appropriate Data Collection Techniques
The next step you should do is to select the appropriate data collection method to create buyer persona. Two methods that you can consider is the method of survey and interview. If you are using interviews, you can interview customers who’ve tried your product. And in this case, you have to accept not only the interviews that flatter your products but also the result of customers who are not satisfied with the services or products you launch. Thus, you will know the advantages and drawbacks of your company.
Once you get the full data from respondents who’ve already been interviewed, it’s time to harness the power of your analysis to identify patterns and the objectives that lie behind such behaviours. Thus, you will be helped to understand the mindset of the consumer.
Discuss with the entire marketing team in creating buyer persona with pointed patterns of behaviour that they know well. You can give a name and even design a face so that the person look more realistic and exciting.
The competition in online business is getting harder day by day. This applies also in many kinds of business, starting from selling products until services offering and so on. If you, as a new businessman does not implement such business marketing strategy, then your brand will not be able to stay along. As we can see today that there are many new online stores whether it is home based business or international business. However, if you also want to open an online store, you do not need to feel restless about the high level of competition. From all above, the most important thing is how you can easily and efficiently market your online business to your targeted audiences. In this occasion, 5 tips to promote your new online business to your potential buyers will be explained thoroughly.
Make a clear content. Even if this topic seems simple, yet it will be such a determiner whether your consumers want to shop in your online store or not. Here, you may start to describe your product clearly, or as an additional information, you may add an article and review that still has correlation with the products.
Connect to social media every time. This is the most familiar way in promoting your new online business. However, it is suggested that you have to be really focus at least on three kinds of social medias. For example facebook, instagram, and twitter. In social media, you have to make a group that is focused on your products and re-share contents which you have made there frequently.
Use specific promotion services. Have you ever heard PPC services or pay-per-click? This service is mostly used by the owner of online shop to market his business and it is effective for beginners. This service is usually offered by search engine like Google with its Google AdWords up to Bing with its program, which is Bing Ads. Then, how does it work? For search engine, it will display your online shop ad and you must pay whenever someone clicks on your ad.
Try to use the fresh innovative marketing strategies. If you are not satisfied with the present marketing strategies, or you may feel that the existence marketing strategy is less suitable to be applied in your online store, then it is possible for you to create a new marketing strategy. By having a capital coherent research and analysis, you are ready to do the experiment for your customers in terms of advertising until such programs like Facebook shop and buy buttons on Pinterest. The key is do not feel hesitate and afraid to fail.
Choose the right advertising option. In this modern era of technology, you are exposed to many kinds of interesting and tempting media advertising. In this case, there is conventional advertising media which relies on such medias like radios, televisions, and newspapers. The advantage of using this kind of media is your product can be seen by wider audiences that cannot be reached by internet. However, its shortcoming is it tends to somewhat uneconomic.
Whilst, further options are an advertisement through video or digital. Both of them include audiences’ network which is connected to cyberspace. This way is considered to be more economic but it should be prepared as creative as possible.
From pay-per-click advertising to blogging and search engine optimization for analysis, e-commerce marketing’s broad, diverse, as well as complex nature, basically has the goal to discover what activities, promotions, and tactics are needed to generate profits. The question is, have you have been successful and are you skilled in e-commerce marketing? If not, check this out!
Five years ago, Practical E-commerce published an article describing the skills essential for e-commerce businesses. Suggestions that can be taken more or less: to write, to know how to learn, and to become skilled listeners. This skill is about the strategic capabilities that is required from employers. Skill building is a tactical ability that will help your e-commerce marketing becomes a success.
1. Writing, Content Marketing
The ability to write is, in essence, the ability to communicate online. Every e-commerce product description, every blog posts, every how-to articles, each of the pages, each video script is the act of writing. Do it well, writing will help encourage the marketing of e-commerce. If not done maximally, it will have an impact as well for your business.
Use something detailed in writing a piece of content marketing, so readers will be able to know clearly what information is contained in an article that you publish. Their role is of course in addition to providing value to the reader, can also draw the reader into a subscriber and would come to the stage as a buyer.
Clear writing is a prerequisite for successful e-commerce marketing.
2. Analysis of Data, Analytics
Successful marketers examine the facts and statistics to make good decisions about how to invest in marketing and promotion. The ability to consider the facts and understand the implications of statistics is called data analysis. It is important for modern e-commerce marketing.
The data analyses have much impact on the field of marketing, including customer acquisition, marketing mix, customer retention, social media, segmentation and promotion strategies;
Marketers who are more effective in using and understanding the data are more likely to succeed.
3. Testing and Data Collection
Closely related to the data analysis is the ability to gather facts and statistics of your company’s marketing performance.
Marketing skills include the ability to set up Google Analytics or similar things, optimize for your e-commerce business with specific, meaningful reports. This includes understanding how the test works and use testing platform like Optimizely or others. It also includes the ability to collect data from each business software packages that you use – such as sales data, email reports, or order management.
In this example, measuring or collecting information about when the respondents are entering is making it easy to see the impact whether email marketing is effective or not. Thus, watch how the practice comes into effect to make better decisions in the future.
If you can collect good information about how your marketing is performing, you are more likely to make good decisions based on such information.
4. Design
Graphic and website design has severe consequences for marketing. How advertisements, articles, or even a product details page is seen has a significant impact on how the email marketing or even how the product is perceived.
One important element on how to bring shoppers is trust. Brand is essentially a way to influence people’s thoughts: This brand represents quality and luxury, or this brand represents convenience and value.
Regardless of what you aim from the customer is the high price, the brand is very influential for it. If the design is less professional and not in tune with the brand’s core message, it could weaken a good display. Conversely, a good design speaks a lot for a company about its professionalism, quality and position in the market.
To achieve a successful e-commerce business, take a look at how your site, your ad and your brand looks.
5. Development
The ability to write code can be a big advantage for marketers. This capability may be as basic as understanding HTML and CSS so you can do a better job of posting articles on WordPress. Or perhaps the ability to develop your own marketing tools and reports.
By some estimates, half of all digital marketing jobs require at least some technical expertise. This happens because so much of what you do online requires at least an understanding of coding.
Learn to code and you will have more control over your marketing. With more control, you have more shots to improve your chances of success.
E-commerce advertisements should be planned, created, purchased, executed, and measured. And it must be done in a lot of channels, using various forms of media, including pay-per-click advertising on search engines and on social media, display advertising, original ads, mobile ads, video ads, and more.
Effective e-commerce marketing is to understand how advertising works and trying to get back the best possibilities for investment.
Advertising management is the skill of high-end marketing that may take a long time to learn and even longer to master. But it is worth the effort. Ads can drive sales and profits.
7. Marketing Email
Citing the Direct Marketing Association, email addresses can determine the development of an online business. Thus, the email may be one of the best ways to reach e-commerce customers. You can communicate directly with consumers who know your business and are interested in your products.
In fact, a survey by the Direct Marketing Association digital marketing found that many people believe that email marketing is, in fact, the most effective marketing tool.
Learning to effectively market via email may be the best thing you do for your e-commerce marketing.
8. Marketing Automation
Marketing automation can reduce marketing costs, improve conversion rates, increase average order value, and, in some cases, even improve the shopper experience.
As skills, marketing automation is about managing the process and workflow automation platforms such as Marketo, Infusionsoft, or even MailChimp.
For your e-commerce marketing, find the right automation tools for your business and master it.
9. Search Engine Optimization
Search engine optimization is the process of making your web pages easy for web crawlers to access and index. The idea is that if Google, Bing, and other search engines can easily find and catalog what is on your page, the easier it becomes to list your website on the results page accordingly.
The purpose of SEO is not to trick the search engines with false content or keyword stuffing, but to help the search engines find and understand your content.
If performed well, SEO will help make your site easy to find, which can lead to marketing success.
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The ability to write is, in essence, the ability to communicate online. Every e-commerce product description, every blog posts, every how-to articles, each of the pages, each video script is the act of writing. Do it well, writing will help encourage the marketing of e-commerce. If not done maximally, it will have an impact as well for your business.
Successful marketers examine the facts and statistics to make good decisions about how to invest in marketing and promotion. The ability to consider the facts and understand the implications of statistics is called data analysis. It is important for modern e-commerce marketing.
Closely related to the data analysis is the ability to gather facts and statistics of your company’s marketing performance.
Graphic and website design has severe consequences for marketing. How advertisements, articles, or even a product details page is seen has a significant impact on how the email marketing or even how the product is perceived.
The ability to write code can be a big advantage for marketers. This capability may be as basic as understanding HTML and CSS so you can do a better job of posting articles on WordPress. Or perhaps the ability to develop your own marketing tools and reports.
E-commerce advertisements should be planned, created, purchased, executed, and measured. And it must be done in a lot of channels, using various forms of media, including pay-per-click advertising on search engines and on social media, display advertising, original ads, mobile ads, video ads, and more.
Citing the Direct Marketing Association, email addresses can determine the development of an online business. Thus, the email may be one of the best ways to reach e-commerce customers. You can communicate directly with consumers who know your business and are interested in your products.
Marketing automation can reduce marketing costs, improve conversion rates, increase average order value, and, in some cases, even improve the shopper experience.
Search engine optimization is the process of making your web pages easy for web crawlers to access and index. The idea is that if Google, Bing, and other search engines can easily find and catalog what is on your page, the easier it becomes to list your website on the results page accordingly.