Determining the right location for your fulfillment center is directly related to retaining your customers or losing them.
There are several questions you should ask when evaluating the potential of a fulfillment center, one being the location.
The location of a fulfillment center has a significant impact on shipping costs and can either become a barrier to your eCommerce business or can help increase its scalability.
There are many factors you must keep in mind while determining the right location.
Be it product origin, accessibility to highways or the future expansion plans of your business. Failure to consider these factors can delay your product delivery to customers, ultimately leading to customer dissatisfaction.
Read on to know some helpful tips to choose a fulfillment center that will facilitate high accuracy in order processing, speed and fulfillment costs.
Determine Where Your Customers are Located
An essential factor in choosing the location of a fulfillment center comes down to the location of your customers.
It is because all courier companies calculate shipping costs in terms of shipping zones. Shipping zones are a crucial aspect of logistics and order fulfillment, as it has a significant impact on shipping costs, delivery time, and shipping efficiency.
Each courier company defines its shipping zones based upon various factors such as distance between the pickup and destination, regional taxes, etc. These are geographical areas carriers ship to, that measures the distance a package travels from the point of origin to the destination.
The less distance a package travels, the quicker it gets delivered to your customers, and the less money you will have to pay for shipping.
Nowadays, customers crave for the speedy delivery of their orders. Being near the majority of your customers, or being located near major hubs that can reach large volumes of customers will ensure they receive their orders as fast as possible.
Do You Need Single Location or Multiple Locations for Your Fulfillment Center?
If you’re just getting started with your business, opting for a single location for your fulfillment center might make sense. Though, as your business grows, you may need to expand and send your inventory to other strategically located fulfillment centers .
Splitting your inventory across multiple locations of a fulfillment center has got several benefits, the most important being that your buyers can expect next-day delivery.
Moreover, you can choose to send only selected SKUs to selected locations, and if one fulfillment center runs out of stock, you will still have the others to serve as backups.
Distributing inventory across fulfillment centers doesn’t mean using multiple fulfillment centers . Choosing a single fulfillment center with multiple locations will help unify systems, technologies, and communication. It helps ensure greater accuracy, transparency, and consistency in service.
Select a Location Close to Major Highways and Shipping Hubs
Choosing a location of your fulfillment center that is close to the major states and shipping hubs is an absolute must to grow your business successfully.
Nearly every product received by your customer will move by trucks. Hence it is essential to select a fulfillment center location that is easily accessible to major highways. It will enable your shipping partner to get your products to the customers on time.
How Shiprocket Fulfillment Can Help you Reach your Customer Fast
Shiprocket Fulfillment is a unique offering by Shiprocket, which is going to provide end-to-end order fulfillment solutions to brands and sellers selling directly to customers either through their website, social circles and so on.
Typically, eCommerce businesses attract demand from all across the country. Besides, in today’s fast-paced life, customers want their products to be delivered on their doorstep in not more than 48 hrs.
In such cases, operating from a single warehouse will cause a delay in delivery, which in turn leads to dissatisfied customers.
For example, Rahul has an eCommerce store in Delhi and operates from a warehouse located in Gurgaon. He receives an order from Mysore and starts processing the order. Considering the distance from where (Gurgaon) the order is processed to the customer’s residence (Mysore), it took 4 days for the order to get delivered. The outcome is a dissatisfied customer, who wanted his order to be delivered within 2 days but instead received it in 4 days.
With Shiprocket Fulfillment’s strategically located fulfillment centers , you can stock your products near to your buyer’s location, which will lead to fast delivery to customers.
If your customers are like most consumers, they want a fast turnaround after they check out online. If you want to succeed, you need to make customer preferences a priority and choose the location of your fulfillment center wisely.
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