Virginia Ecommerce Fulfilment Centres and Services
Request a QuoteMany ecommerce business owners struggle to focus on creating the best product and growing their business when most of their time is spent on fulfilment logistics. But when customers expect shipping to be faster and cheaper than ever, it’s equally important to have a solid shipping strategy in place.
One of the best ways to get started with an effective shipping strategy is to understand shipping zones. Shipping zones are the units used by mail couriers to measure the distance a package must travel from its point of origin to its destination.
Shipping zones also determine the shipping cost: the further away the destination is from the package’s origin, the more zones it crosses and the more expensive and time-consuming shipping is. The key to bringing your costs down and delivering faster is reducing the shipping zones packages must travel through to reach its destination.
This is where ShipBob comes in.
We’re a 3PL fulfilment provider that helps businesses lower their shipping costs and delivery times. One way we do this is with a distribution method known as distributed inventory. You can store your products in one or multiple fulfilment centres located in various regions across the continental US.
This method allows you to follow the data and store your products closer to where your customers live, which reduces shipping zones, rates, and delivery times.
And more efficient shipping isn’t all you get with ShipBob. Read on to learn why more and more ecommerce brands are choosing to outsource fulfilment.
Why do customers choose ShipBob?
Health and wellness brand Synchro started out shipping orders with ShipBob, but as they grew, they wanted to explore other fulfilment options. They found that only ShipBob could follow through on promises to bring down shipping costs and transit times. Synchro now ships over 3,000 orders per month, and offers 2 shipping to 80% of their customers.
“We loved our implementation experience, and our Onboarding Specialist and Account Manager have been so accessible, invested, open, and hands on. They are awesome and on top of it — I’ve known what’s going on every step of the way.”
Lindsay Louise, Fulfilment & Retail Manager at Synchro
How ShipBob fulfils orders for Virginia-based ecommerce businesses
ShipBob doesn’t have a single fulfilment centre in Virginia. Instead, we have fulfilment centres located on the West Coast (Moreno Valley, California), the Midwest (Chicago, Illinois), the East Coast (Bethlehem, Pennsylvania) and the South (Dallas, Texas).
The fulfilment centre you choose doesn’t necessarily have to be close to where your team operates. You can actually save money and enhance your shipping strategy by taking a data-driven approach to choosing the right fulfilment centre location(s). Here’s how it works:
- Talk to a fulfilment expert that will act as your logistics consultant.
- Go through a robust implementation process.
- Connect your store to ShipBob’s technology and shipping your products to the fulfilment centres closest to where your customers reside.
- Orders placed on your store are automatically forwarded to the fulfilment centre with your inventory.
- Fulfilment professionals pick, pack, and ship the order.
- Tracking information is sent to the customer (and you can view it as well from your ShipBob dashboard).
- You get advanced analytics into your sales performance, transit times, and other distribution metrics.
Real-time inventory tracking
Many ecommerce businesses struggle to keep accurate track of their inventory counts, then stockouts happen, and orders get delayed or cancelled as a result. Not with ShipBob. Our platform makes inventory tracking easy by setting automatic reorder points, so you automatically receive a notification when counts are getting low.
Easy onboarding
ShipBob’s proprietary software is simple to setup and requires no programming or coding. We provide a robust implementation program that helps you get your online store synced to our software, set your shipping options, and explains all of ShipBob’s processes.
2-day shipping options
With your inventory distributed across multiple fulfilment centres, reaching customers in any corner of the US is that much easier and quicker. Reducing shipping zones means lower rates and better margins, which you can pass along to the customer in the form of affordable 2-day shipping. We also offer a 2-Day Express Shipping Program that enables 2-day shipping for all customers located in the continental US — even if you decide to store inventory in one US fulfilment location.
How ShipBob can help your Virginia-based business use shipping to grow faster
Though ecommerce businesses often treat shipping as an afterthought, shipping is such a critical part of the customer experience in ecommerce that it can make or break your business. It’s one of the main factors that customers will use to judge your business and will determine whether they come back (or if they’ll buy in the first place).
By optimising your shipping, ShipBob can benefit your business in numerous ways.
Save on your bottom line
One of the biggest retail fulfilment services that we provide for our customers is lowering shipping rates by reducing shipping zones. Lower shipping rates not only let you offer your customers better options, but they improve your bottom line as well.
Case in point: ShipBob client Ample Foods achieved 13% cost-savings to their bottom line after partnering with ShipBob, while at the same time increasing 2-day ground shipping coverage by 103%.
Scale order fulfilment
With ShipBob, there are no limits to growth. We offer the infrastructure, team, and technology to handle any amount of orders (and we can save you a ton of time in the process).
For example, CBD company Nature’s Ultra was able to scale rapidly and achieved 9,900% growth year over year after partnering with ShipBob. By splitting their inventory across 3 different fulfilment centres, they’re able to offer 2-day shipping to 100% of US customers.
Reach customers all over the country (and the world)
If you are only shipping from a Virginia-based fulfilment centre, then shipping to the West Coast (and many other parts of the US) will be expensive. With ShipBob’s help, you can store your inventory in any region and reach customers in all corners of the US.
International shipping is also possible in terms of shipping across the world and by utilising ShipBob’s global locations. After partnering with ShipBob,
The Adventure Challenge chose ShipBob for not just domestic shipping but to expand all over the world. Today, they’re using ShipBob’s fulfilment centres in the US, Australia, Canada, the UK, and the EU.
Knowing the right time to outsource fulfilment to a 3PL
Not every ecommerce merchant will benefit from outsourcing: if you’re in the earliest stages of growth and only have a few local customers, then radically upscaling your fulfilment capacity won’t do you a ton of good. But there are many situations in which outsourcing to a 3PL is beneficial, and not all of them are related to order volume (though that’s important).
If you recognize any of the following scenarios, it may be time to outsource:
- You devote too much time, resources, and energy to fulfilment.
- You lack the expertise or desire to master distribution and fulfilment.
- Your warehouse is messy and overstocked, and you’re struggling to find product and match your inventory levels.
- You want cheaper shipping rates and faster deliveries.
- You want to provide two-day shipping.
- Your inventory or order management systems are out of date and you’re looking for a higher-quality proprietary software.
If the above fulfilment needs match yours, working with an order fulfilment company could help. Whether you need to expand or scale your ecommerce warehousing, implement an inventory management system, lower fulfilment costs, or just smooth out your fulfilment process, ShipBob has the services you need. We work with many online businesses and specialize in getting ecommerce orders out as cost-effective and efficient as possible.
Request a pricing quote below to learn more about ShipBob’s services.
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We ship all over the world
We use our network of fulfillment centers to help you strategically split and manage your inventory to reduce shipping costs and transit times.
