Let’s be honest, disruptions in the supply chain are bound to happen, and when they do, fulfilling customer orders can be compromised. And those compromises, whether in the form of delays or damaged packaging, can break brand trust.
Fulfillment and all the logistics associated with running an online business is a puzzle that every owner must try to solve. The resilience and scale of your supply chain is a key determinant of your business’s success.
According to a supply chain study conducted by McKinsey, 97% of survey respondents said they’ve applied “some combination of inventory increases, dual sourcing, and regionalization to boost resilience.” You may have taken similar measures to protect your business and ensure that your customers get their orders on time.
The way the fulfillment puzzle comes together depends on the strategy and goals of the business. Whether you’re using a third-party logistics (3PL) provider or Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA), inevitably, you’re going to need to fit all the pieces together to grow your business.
Our new Simplifying Fulfillment ebook provides some proven tactics that you can use to simplify fulfillment so you can focus on growing your business and building relationships with your customers.
Simplifying your multichannel ecommerce supply chain operations
Today’s online shoppers expect fast, free shipping and easy returns. Businesses that don’t offer these features risk being outrun by competitors. According to Baymard Institute, 48% of shoppers abandon their carts because of additional shipping fees, and 22% of shoppers abandon carts because delivery was too slow.
By bringing a Prime shopping experience with fast, free shipping and easy returns to your ecommerce site, Buy with Prime can help you meet customer expectations and save you time.
How does Buy with Prime simplify ecommerce fulfillment?
Buy with Prime, which leverages Amazon’s Multi-Channel Fulfillment (MCF), allows you to take advantage of Amazon’s world-class fulfillment network to deliver the Prime promise of free 1-2 day shipping on eligible orders on your own site. With automatic inventory placement, Amazon’s fulfillment centers can store products closer to customers in order to keep shipping costs low and help meet seasonal spikes in demand.
How does Buy with Prime help accelerate growth of your ecommerce business?
MCF helps you streamline the picking, packing, and shipping of Buy with Prime products ordered from your site so that you can focus on your big-picture business strategy. Specifically, the following are three ways Buy with Prime can help you grow:
- Scaling operations: Pooled inventory stored in Amazon fulfillment centers allows you to use the same inventory to fulfill orders on Amazon.com and your ecommerce site.
- Automated order tracking: When your customers use Buy with Prime to make purchases on your site, they automatically receive emails to confirm their purchase, update them on shipping status, and confirm order delivery.
- Delighting your customers: Providing fast, free delivery and easy returns can help build shopper confidence in your brand.
Get more insights in the Simplifying Fulfillment ebook.
Effective catalog management can help grow your business
Any business that sells online needs to ensure that its product catalog is well-organized and constantly maintained. An organized product catalog helps you manage inventory, and track which products are most profitable. With an organized catalog, you can identify opportunities for growth more easily.
The following are a few simple tips to help optimize sales and scale your business:
- Get standardized. When you’re building your product catalog, you’re creating a periodic table of elements for your store. The more organized your product catalog, the easier it is to automate product recommendations, refine search results, and seamlessly integrate across various sales channels.
- Provide the details. Make sure that all the relevant details, such as dimensions, sizing, materials, and images, are included for each product. Once you’ve covered the fundamentals, offer your shoppers some insight into your unique selling propositions (for example: if you’re sourcing only sustainable materials, call that out in the product details). Also, product videos and customer reviews can be effective ways to motivate shoppers to complete a purchase.
- Don’t skew your SKUs. Develop SKU naming conventions that are formatted in a way that’s easy for you and your employees to identify products. Create a shorthand that will help you immediately recognize color, size, design, or other relevant information, separated with dashes.
Explore additional tips to simplify your business operations.