A fulfillment service is a third party warehouse that prepares and ships your orders for you. Using a fulfillment service is a great option if you don’t want to have to deal with shipping, or if you’ve grown beyond your existing warehousing capabilities to a point where you can’t ship items manually anymore.
Order fulfillment, in general, refers to the steps involved in receiving, processing and delivering orders to end customers.
This general definition can apply to many types of orders, from large business-to-business (B2B) orders, to individual direct-to-consumer (D2C) orders.
Receiving
Whether you outsource your order fulfillment to a company like eFulfillment Service, or you choose to do it in-house, receiving inventory from your manufacturers or suppliers is the first step toward getting orders to your end customers.
Inventory Storage
Once inventory has been received, counted, inspected, labeled, and added to your warehouse management software, it is time for it to be shelved.
Shipping
After an order has been picked and packed, it is moved to a shipping station to prep it for delivery to the end customer.
Returns Processing
When answering the question, “What is Order Fulfillment?,” it’s important not to forget about returns.
For online buyers, the ability to easily return purchased items is an important part of the buying decision. For online sellers, the ability to effectively handle those returns is critical to their fulfillment operations, and to their overall businesses.
If you shop online, most probably you have used a fulfillment Service.
International 3PL specializes in fulfillment.
