Shipping And Fulfillment Options For Ecommerce Businesses

There are many steps ecommerce businesses must take to bring a product to market. After finding a need in the market, a savvy businessproduces or finds a product that will fill that need, creates the price of the product, and makes a plan to market it successfully. Figuring out how to fulfill orders and ship the productis another crucial step of this process. Business owners must choose how their customers will receive their orders, how much they’ll charge for shipping, and whether to offer free returns and exchanges.

Here’s a look at two of the primary methods that ecommerce businessesuse to ship their products.

E-commerce fulfillment refers to purchasing product stock in wholesale amounts, marketing and selling them online, and filling orders in-house. With e-commerce fulfilment, e-tailersmust maintain physical inventory of what they sell. The products they sell and the volume they do will determine how much space they need to maintain that inventory.

Drop-shipping, on the other hand, allows ecommerce businesses to sell products without having to keep a physical inventory. While the retailers still create online stores and market their products, they do not fill the orders. Instead, an outside company is hired to handle that part of the process. They don’t have to purchase inventory, which makes it less expensive to launch a drop shipping business than if they provided their e-commerce fulfillment.

The accompanying resource, by AMS Fulfillment,discusses more about the differences and similarities between the two shipping options, as well as the pros and cons to each method.