There comes a point when packing your own ecommerce orders stops making sense. Stock starts taking over the available space, dispatch eats into the working day and a busy sales period can quickly turn into a backlog.
For growing Shopify businesses, outsourcing order fulfilment means handing the physical side of the process to a partner who can store your products, receive your orders, pick and pack them and manage dispatch.
At Birch, we already support ecommerce businesses in this way, giving their teams more time to concentrate on marketing, sales and growing the brand.
What does Shopify order fulfilment involve?
Order fulfilment covers what happens after your customer places their order.
Once your Shopify order information reaches the fulfilment system, the relevant products can be picked from stock, packed to your agreed specification and prepared for dispatch.
Depending on what your business needs, fulfilment can include:
- Secure product storage and stock management.
- Picking and packing individual customer orders.
- Branded packaging, tissue, inserts and labels.
- Dispatch through established delivery networks.
- Tracking through courier consignment information.
- Returns and exchanges.
- Stock monitoring and agreed re-order triggers.
Rather than managing several parts of that process yourself, they can be brought together under one fulfilment operation.
Signs you have outgrown fulfilling orders yourself
Many ecommerce businesses start by packing orders themselves. It works when volumes are manageable, but growth can quickly change that.
You may be ready to outsource fulfilment if:
- Packing and dispatch are taking hours out of your working day.
- Products are taking over your office, spare room or other storage space.
- Keeping an accurate view of stock is becoming harder.
- Sales, launches and Christmas create sudden pressure on fulfilment.
- You want to grow your product range without increasing the amount of time spent packing orders.
- You would rather concentrate on marketing and growing the business.
Birch has worked with ecommerce businesses that began by fulfilling orders themselves, reached the point where it became too much to manage internally and then moved fulfilment to a specialist partner.
Connecting Shopify with fulfilment
One of the biggest considerations when outsourcing Shopify fulfilment is how orders move from your ecommerce store into the fulfilment operation.
Birch can work with existing ecommerce and order management systems including Shopify, Magneto, Etsy and Woocommerce, with the setup tailored to the business and its requirements.
For Shopify customers, this can include connecting Shopify with Birch’s fulfilment portal so order information can be brought into the fulfilment workflow, ready for the warehouse team to pick, pack and dispatch.
This removes the need for your team to spend each day manually passing individual orders to the warehouse and creates a much more scalable process as order numbers grow.
What happens to your stock?
Products are received and stored at Birch’s secure 27,000 sq ft warehouse in Ilkeston.
Stock can include products supplied by Birch as well as third-party items supplied by you or another manufacturer. This is particularly useful for ecommerce brands selling a mixture of printed products, merchandise, clothing, packaging and other retail items.
Stock levels can then be monitored as orders are fulfilled, with reporting and agreed re-order triggers available to help prevent important products unexpectedly running out.
Pick, pack and dispatch
When orders come through, the fulfilment team picks the relevant products and packs them according to the agreed requirements for your brand.
That can be much more than putting an item into a standard box.
Through Birch’s product packaging service, ecommerce orders can include branded boxes, tissue paper, inserts, stickers and other printed elements.
It means outsourcing fulfilment does not have to mean losing control of the customer experience. The parcel arriving at your customer’s door can still look and feel like it has come directly from your brand.
Handling growth and busy periods
Outsourcing becomes particularly useful when order volumes fluctuate.
A product launch, promotion, Black Friday or Christmas can produce a sudden increase in orders. Managing that internally can mean finding extra space and people for a peak that may only last a few weeks.
A fulfilment partner already has the warehouse space, systems and people in place to manage changing volumes.
Birch’s fulfilment operation is designed to support anything from ongoing ecommerce orders to larger campaigns and busy periods, with an experienced pick-and-pack team and established delivery network.
What about returns?
Fulfilment does not necessarily finish when the parcel leaves the warehouse.
Birch can also manage product returns and exchanges as part of its third party logistics service.
Returned items can be handled through the agreed process, helping keep stock information accurate without your team having to manage returns separately.
More than a fulfilment house
One of the advantages of working with Birch is that fulfilment sits alongside print, packaging and branded merchandise.
If you need packaging, printed inserts, labels or merchandise for your ecommerce business, Birch can help source and produce those elements as well as storing and fulfilling the finished products.
Third-party products can also be brought into the same fulfilment operation where required.
For growing brands, that can mean fewer suppliers and fewer handovers between production, storage, packing and dispatch.
Take Shopify dispatch off your desk
If your Shopify store is growing but packing orders is taking more and more of your time, outsourcing fulfilment can give you the space to concentrate on the parts of the business that drive that growth.
Birch can support the process from storage and stock management through to pick and pack, branded packaging, dispatch and returns.
Take a look at our print fulfilment and delivery and third party logistics services, or get in touch to talk through how your Shopify orders could work with Birch.
