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
Many small and middle-class companies want to develop businesses by exporting goods to larger markets. But only a few entrepreneurs thought of trying to export in order to expand the range of their markets. Why are exports often unthinkable and passed up by business leaders? Probably because not many entrepreneurs know how to export goods. The procedures, documents, and permits that have to be met make many think that export is difficult. It is actually easier than import that needs more rules to fulfill tax payments.
Tax revenues and imports also have different regulations. When we start importing, we need to pay taxes for almost everything that we import. Whereas when we export, not all products are taxed exports and customs. Only a few of the products are taxed on exports and customs. The products are timber, rattan, and vegetable oil. For clothing, fish, corn, bananas, food, and electronic items, it is now free of taxes and customs.
What needs to be prepared before we start exporting?
Before exporting your products abroad, you need to prepare items for packing and distributing to the container. When the goods are ready you need to wait for the ship’s schedule and submit a PEB to the customs office. After obtaining approval to export, you may be able to take goods up to the port to be transported to the target country. But every exported item still has its own rules to be met by exporters, depends on where your country is.
Then how do you plan to develop a business with exports? Exporting products out of Indonesia is almost the same as selling products out of where your business stands. Only exports require some documents, permits, and processes that must be passed through.
To begin the first export move in your business, you can start by following these steps:
Try to find out if the product you will export is forbidden to be exported by your government or not
Source: Master Link Express
You can access the single window system in your country to find out which goods can be exported and imported and also the tax returns. Don’t forget to make sure the item you export is allowed to enter the country where the product will be imported from Indonesia, so you can see if the item is included in the import ban or not.
Find your product buyer from overseas
Source: The Weekly Times
You could do it in a variety of ways like making a marketing team, setting up a website to introduce your company and product catalog. You could also load your items on international e-commerce or e-commerce that is commonly used in your destination country.
Prepare the items and documents
Source: Cornwalls
After you get a purchase or order of your buyer, prepare the items and documents. Then you should notify the customs authorities by bringing in the export declaration documents which consist of an invoice, packing list and other complementary documents
Do errands to the destination country
Source: ASEAN Briefing
Once it’s approved by customs, you’ll get the export service memorandum where your goods have been approved into export goods. From here you can already do errands to the destination country.
Insured your items
Source: Magyar Posta Zrt.
Don’t forget to insured your items if your contract with the buyer is CIF.
If you have difficulty with exports, AsiaCommerce has a service to help you export. We can also help you to market and sell your products, both a retail product or a product that needs to be sold in a huge amount. We are making it possible for local business leaders to cooperate with the International global market. Besides export service, we can also help you to import, transport, search for foreign products and handle distribution issues of your company in southeast Asia.
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