Order fulfillment comes with many moving parts: inventory management, order management, shipping, and more. A third-party logistics (3PL) partner can help optimize your fulfillment strategy from integrating your ecommerce tech stack to reducing shipping costs.

ShipBob is a tech-enabled 3PL that specifically caters to ecommerce. Our proprietary technology integrates with top ecommerce solutions and powers our network of fulfillment centers located throughout the US and Canada. Partner with us and you can store your ecommerce inventory in multiple fulfillment centers based on where your customers live. 

If you are based in the Southeast US but much of your customer base lives in California, then you can split your inventory between our fulfillment centers in Tennessee and California. This shortens the amount of shipping zones a package must travel through, which ultimately provides better shipping rates. 

“We need to deliver quickly and inexpensively. Since switching to ShipBob from our previous 3PL, our fulfillment cost on comparable orders went down by 25%.”

Michael Peters, VP of E-Commerce Operations at TB12

Ecommerce order fulfillment services for the Southeast US

Setting up retail order fulfillment with ShipBob is easy and our onboarding process is designed to get you started shipping quickly. Here’s how it works:

1. Sync your store with ShipBob’s technology, so we are notified when customers place an order at your store.

2. Ship your inventory to a ShipBob fulfillment center (or several) located nearest to your customer base. 

3. Picking lists are auto-generated at our fulfillment centers for each order; our fulfillment teams prepare and ship the order. 

4. The customer receives tracking info (and you can view it from your dashboard). 

Warehousing & inventory management

Keeping your inventory organized and ensuring your counts match physical inventory are challenges that many ecommerce businesses struggle with. When you outsource fulfillment to ShipBob, you’re given the support, technology, and resources to better manage your inventory, forecast demand, and even set automatic reorder points from your ShipBob dashboard to avoid stockout.

Order transparency and analytics

ShipBob doesn’t just handle fulfillment, we provide full transparency into the fulfillment process and a variety of distribution metrics. You can check order status, search for outstanding orders, and track packages all in real time. ShipBob’s free analytics and reporting tool aggregates various data sets covering each aspect of your business: shipping insights, fulfillment performance, demand forecasting, logistics costs, and more. 

ShipBob: the best 3PL solution in the Southeast US

With one fulfillment center in the Southeast US and four others located across the country, by partnering with ShipBob you can radically expand your shipping capacity while saving a ton of energy and manpower. Here are some of the ways we’ve benefited our clients: 

Scale your shipping capacity

If you’re self-fulfilling all of your orders in-house, then you’re severely limited in your ability to grow. You can only ship as many orders as you have the manpower, infrastructure, and resources to ship. With ShipBob, there’s no limit to the amount of orders you can fulfill, and you adopt our entire distribution infrastructure that spans the US. 

Unburdened of the hassle of dealing with fulfillment and with a newfound increase in shipping capacity, your business can scale faster. Several of our partners have experienced this. For example, Ecommerce brand Kula Cloth was able to triple sales after partnering with ShipBob, shipping as many as 73 orders in a single day, all without the founder having to lift a finger. 

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Offer 2-day shipping

Affordable 2-day shipping is a must in the modern ecommerce landscape, but many businesses fulfilling in-house struggle to offer 2-day shipping without breaking the bank. This is especially true for  businesses with a customer base spread out across the country, which is the case for most ecommerce companies. 

With ShipBob, you can offer 2-day shipping by splitting inventory across multiple fulfillment center locations. After selling out during at the start of the pandemic, hand sanitizer brand was able to get orders delivered quickly by storing inventory in several ShipBob fulfillment locations. 

“Touchland sells flammable goods that need to be shipped via ground, so ShipBob has been a great ally as they have fulfillment centers all over the US, facilitating a 2-3 day delivery time for any customer in the US.”

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Drive down shipping costs

The optimized shipping that you get with ShipBob doesn’t just allow you to ship faster, you also get better shipping rates. Our distributed inventory system brings your inventory closer to customers, and our technology automatically searches the top mail carriers to find the best rates. 

Supplement company TB12 achieved 25% cost-savings after switching from a different 3PL, while also achieving 75% growth. 

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When should I outsource fulfillment to a 3PL?

Constraints on the fulfillment process are often a bottleneck for growth. You may lack storage space or shipping capacity, or you may be stuck offering slow and costly shipping options that drive down sales.

The right time to outsource will depend on which areas of fulfillment are hampering your ability to scale, and which phase of growth your business is in. If you are experiencing any of the following problems, then you might be ready to outsource:

• Your inventory warehouse is overloaded or disorganized. 
• Your team is struggling to keep up with orders. 
• You have one fulfillment center in the Southeast US, and pay too much for shipping outside that region. 
• You spend too much time on administrative tasks involved with fulfillment.

Ready to get started with a 3PL? Request a quote from ShipBob. 

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