Fast Fulfilment Services
Is your current fulfilment process slowing you down?
To stay competitive, online brands need a fulfilment strategy that enables fast fulfilment to meet customer expectations around fast and affordable shipping. But without a robust fulfilment infrastructure and advanced technology, it can be hard to keep up with customer demand and the competition.
That’s why fast-growing brands partner with ShipBob, a best-in-class ecommerce fulfilment provider that offers fast fulfilment services. Read on about how ShipBob’s fast fulfilment solution can improve your bottom line and boost customer satisfaction.
ShipBob has been the perfect partner. Their speed to scale and fast pick, pack, and ship process has been seamless, as our business grew 1,200% in a couple of weeks.
Andrea Lisbona,
Founder & CEO of Touchland
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Fast fulfilment involves the ability to not efficiently and accurately pick and pack customer orders, but it also relates to offering fast, affordable shipping.
Fulfilment is often slowed down due to a lack of technology andlogistics automation, inventory distribution, andproduct allocation, which all plays a role in optimising the fulfilment process. Not to mention, as your order volume grows, you and your team will have to spend more time on logistics operations, rather than focusing on other important business tasks.
The good news isthird-party logistics (3PLs) providers like ShipBob can offer fast fulfilment solutions for ecommerce businesses when order volume becomes difficult to keep up with.
Customers expect fast fulfilment
Here are the facts:
- 25 %of online shoppers have entirely canceled an order because of slow delivery speeds.
- 53% of consumers said that delivery time is an important factor when it comes to evaluating their online orders.
- 51% of ecommerce retailers are already offering same-day delivery, as compared to only 16% in 2016
Thanks to major online marketplaces like Amazon and Walmart, customers expect fast fulfilment no matter what they order. That means, most online brands need a fast fulfilment process in place thatoptimises their supply chain.
By establishing a fulfilment process that enables low-cost and fast options at checkout can help prevent shoppers fromabandoning their cart. Providing options like guaranteed 2-day shipping helps ensure customers will have a positive delivery experience and encourage them to purchase from you again in the future. Enabling fast and affordable shipping can be done in several ways, especially when you partner with a 3PL like ShipBob.
Fulfilment speed is more important than you think
Fast fulfilment is not just about creating a fast and accurate pick, pack, and ship process. Fulfilment speed has the power to improve your bottom line, boost customer satisfaction, reduce cart abandonment, and more. Here are a few reasons why fulfilment speed is an important factor in ecommerce growth.
1. Maintains high customer satisfaction
Consumers today want fast shipping. The average maximum amount of time considered acceptable to wait for a package is only 4.1 days compared to 5.5 days back in 2012.
In the age of instant gratification, offering guaranteed two-day shipping, or transit times that won’t be seen as “too long” in their eyes, can lead to a positive customer experience. In turn, this can lead to better customer reviews and recommendations.
2. Quicker return management
A 3PL can make ecommerce returns easier. With fast fulfilment, you’re also able to speed up the returns process. You can provide customers with prepaid return labels and share return tracking information.
Some 3PL’s technology even support integrations that automatically text returns updates to customers. Find the option that works best for you — whether the 3PL provides advanced services such as ironing or refurbishing or simply lets returns be mailed back to you so you can inspect them yourself.
3. Increase visibility across multi-channel platforms
For an ecommerce business to scale, it’s crucial to have visibility into inventory levels at all times.
Having full inventory visibility enables you to prepare for the unexpected and provides you with the data and analytics you need to make better business decisions, such as how to efficiently allocate inventory across your distribution network for faster fulfilment and shipping.
When online retailers have the tools they need to manage, view, and optimise inventory levels in real time, they are able to act quickly to ensure demand is met.
4. Reduces cart abandonment rate
Two of the top reasons for high cart abandonment rates are high shipping costs and slow fulfilment and delivery. Storing inventory closer to your customers not only speeds fulfilment, but it also reduces shipping costs.
To increase conversions and ultimately grow your business, offering a lower-cost expedited delivery option can help prevent some people from abandoning their cart. Of course, it must be the right balance of healthy margins and profitability for you, and what’s appealing to your customers.
“With ShipBob’s 2-Day Express Shipping Program, we’ve seen an 18% reduction in cart abandonment.”
Founder of My Calm Blanket
Leave fulfilment to the ShipBob experts
ShipBob is a leading 3PL that partners with over 5,000 ecommerce businesses in a wide range of industries across the globe. ShipBob offers a growing international fulfilment network, 2-day shipping via ground, premium technology, and best-in-class customer support. Here is an overview of how ShipBob fast fulfilment services can help keep your business competitive.
Process order volumes easily
As soon as an order is created or imported into your ShipBob dashboard, it is automatically sent to one of our fulfilment centres with your inventory to be fulfilled. We assign orders to our picking team, who receive a picking list of the items, quantities, and storage locations at our facility to procure and count to complete their pick.
ShipBob also offers order tracking and gives you the tools to maintain complete control and visibility into warehouse operations, even with you being outside of the four walls of the warehouse. In other words, you can outsource fulfilment logistics while still maintaining full control, spending far less time on logistics, and getting best-in-class support.
“Compared to other warehouses we’ve worked with, ShipBob processes orders so quickly to get them out the door faster. It’s fun to see orders shipping out instantaneously. I love how fast and efficient ShipBob is.”
Harley Abrams, Operations Manager ofSuperSpeed Golf, LLC
2-day fast shipping
If a customer’s address is within ShipBob’s predetermined area of coverage, the customer will be offered a guaranteed 2-day via ground shipping option at a significantly lower price than expedited 2-day air.
ShipBob also has a 2-Day Express Program, which enables enables fast delivery for all continental US orders for any of our ecommerce store integrations. With 2-day shipping as the standard, merchants have been able to reduce cart abandonment by 18% and increase average order value by 97%.
“An hour after an influencer ordered from me, he had already received an email saying his order had shipped. If I was fulfilling orders myself, it would have taken me much longer. This was the perfect example of ShipBob working how it should, automatically sending tracking info and giving my customers everything they needed.”
Tracey Wallace, Founder of Doris Sleep
Distributed warehouse network
With customers today expecting a two-day turnaround for their orders (and many accepting nothing longer), using multiple warehousing and storage locations lets you significantly reduce last-mile delivery times.
If you are only using one ecommerce warehouse, you are limited to offering 2-day ground shipping exclusively to that region. If you want to extend your 2-day ground shipping coverage, you can do so by utilising more than one fulfilment centre, for example, covering different regions on the country. By doing so, you can put more customers in the 2-day shipping range of ground coverage.
And the more people you offer 2-day shipping to — at a fraction of the cost of expedited air shipping — can ultimately help reduce abandoned carts for more shoppers.
For customers thatsplit inventory across multiple locations, our 3PL software algorithm automatically selects the fulfilment centre with available inventory that’s closest to the end customer for a shorter transit time.
“The more fulfilment centres we have inventory in, the more potential shipping addresses we can offer 2-day shipping to. And the more people that we offer the benefit of free 2-day shipping to, the more conversions we get. With ShipBob’s 2-Day Express Program, we’ve seen an 18% reduction in cart abandonment.”
Founder of My Calm Blanket
Accurate order fulfilment
ShipBob is also constantly implementing new technology and automation tools to improve order accuracy, such as automated sorting and box selection algorithms that use dimensions and your packaging preferences to tell us which package size to use for any order combination to provide consistent, predictable fulfilment pricing and a good customer experience.
ShipBob customers can upload photos of their products for the picking and packing teams to see and validate upon fulfilment to reduce the possibility of an order being picked or shipped the wrong way. You can even edit an order in ShipBob until it is picked in the event that a customer wants to change something after they place their order.
“We can see our orders come in and get fulfilled in real-time without any hiccups for the most part, which is great. Our fulfilment is on autopilot. ShipBob saves us so much effort, and the opportunity cost savings has been substantial.”
Yannick Crespo, Co-Founder & President of Pot d’Huile
In addition to focusing on achieving a high order accuracy rate, we also closely measure ‘support cases per order,’ which is a bigger indicator on how well we’re performing as your logistics partner.
Sales forecast demand
ShipBob offers demand forecasting tools, data, and analytics to help you predict future demand by using historical sales data. That way, you can make informed business decisions about everything from inventory planning and warehousing to running promotions.
ShipBob also aggregates transit times, cart values, shipping methods, and ecommerce shipping destinations to help you optimise your costs and test different shipping price strategies. We also help you understand how much inventory to order and keep on hand — without running out of stock or over-spending on manufacturing or warehousing.
“On the supply chain side, I just throw in what we placed at the factory into a WRO in the ShipBob dashboard, and I can see how many units we have on-hand, what’s incoming, what’s at docks, and so on. I can see all of those numbers in a few seconds, and it makes life so much easier.”
Harley Abrams, Operations Manager of SuperSpeed Golf, LLC
Switching to ShipBob is quick and easy
Getting started with ShipBob is simple. Once you sync your online store to our technology, we help get you up and running quickly. As soon as we receive you inventory, orders are automatically sent to the closest fulfilment centre to the order’s destination and is quickly picked, packed and shipped.
“Nine days after we got started with ShipBob’s implementation team, we were shipping orders.”
Tim Fink, Co-Founder of EnduroSport
To learn more about ShipBob’s fast fulfilment solutions, fill out the form below to request custom pricing.
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Fast fulfilment FAQs
Here are answers to the most common questions related to fast fulfilment.
How does 2-day shipping work?
There are two primary methods that enable delivery in 2 days: air shipping and ground shipping. While it is much more expensive than , air shipping may be the only shipping method that can guarantee a 2-day turnaround, when coming from overseas or the other side of the country. Merchants that offer 2-day shipping via a ground typically ship orders from fulfilment centres in different regions to cover more ground.
Why is fast fulfilment important?
Fast fulfilment is important because customers expect fast, affordable shipping. Fast fulfilment helps online brands compete with established brands and marketplaces like Amazon and Walmart. Fast fulfilment can be achieved by outsourcing fulfilment to a 3PL like ShipBob, that makes it easy to connect your store to their fulfilment technology, so orders can be automatically picked, packed, and shipped as soon as possible.
How does ShipBob offer fast shipping options?
ShipBob offers same-day fulfilment for B2C orders imported into the ShipBob dashboard by the time of the outbound fulfilment SLA (ranging from noon to 6pm local time of the fulfilment centre fulfilling it, depending on the location) to ensure our carrier partners ship them out later that day. All orders imported after the cutoff time will be shipped by the next business day. Merchants can also distribute their inventory to multiple ShipBob fulfilment centres that are closest to their end customers to reducing shipping costs and speed. This lets merchants offer their customers affordable expedited services.
To offer 2-day shipping v all customers located in the continental US, no matter where you store inventory, you can opt in for ShipBob’s 2-Day Express Program.
How do you sign up for ShipBob’s Express Shipping?
ShipBob’s 2-Day Express Program is available for all merchants and can turn be turned on at any time from the ShipBob dashboard. For more information and instructions on how to set it up, click here.