6 Traits of Highly Effective Fulfillment Services Providers

If you think one fulfillment 3PL is as good as the next, you may be in for an unpleasant surprise when your fulfillment services provider fails you.

Not all order fulfillment partners have the same capabilities or operate according to industry best practices. It can take months or more to extricate your business from an unfulfilling fulfillment relationship, so make sure you pick the best 3PL for the job upfront. Look for the following characteristics in your 3PL to make sure you’re getting the best service available.

1. Incredible service

Your customers expect to receive the exact goods they ordered on time. After all, having fast pick rates doesn’t matter much if error rates are high. Conversely, accurately picked orders aren’t good enough when everything ships late. Selecting a fulfillment partner that excels at all fulfillment functions helps protect your brand and foster good customer relationships.

2. Excellent communication

Online sellers need up-to-date data about fulfillment activities to make informed decisions about procurement, inventory, and advertising. Some 3PLs provide such reports only monthly or weekly. The top-performing fulfillment services providers offer daily or hourly updates, ensuring that retail partners have the necessary information to streamline other functions, such as supply chain forecasting, sales, marketing, and more.

3. High flexibility/agility

Your business will change over time, and your fulfillment 3PL must be able to adapt operations quickly to accommodate things like new product launches, promotion-related order spikes and the like. A lack of agility – particularly as it relates to labor allocation – can drive up fulfillment costs. On the other hand, high-performance fulfillment providers will build adaptability into operations to streamline processes. Whether you need kits retooled on the fly or want to run a flash sale, your 3PL should always be able to handle it effectively – without issue.

4. Scalability

Scalability goes hand-in-hand with flexibility and agility, and many retailers have had their growth potential stunted by a logistics provider that wasn’t able to expand services to support sales growth. If you start with 50,000 shipments annually and grow to five million annual shipments within a few years, you need to know that your fulfillment services provider can scale with that demand. The leaders of your organization need to be free to pursue profitable growth, without worrying about whether the back-end fulfillment operation can keep up.

Think of your online sales business as an airplane and your fulfillment provider as the runway. When you’re ready to accelerate and lift off, the runway doesn’t have limitations; it’s always there to support your launch.

5. Partnership

A 3PL relationship is about more than stuffing products in boxes on your behalf. It’s about getting to know your goals and aspirations as a business, your culture, and the needs of your buyers. It’s about diving into historical order patterns and understanding details that might impact the fulfillment strategy. A substandard 3PL won’t ask the many “context” questions about fulfillment necessary to be a true partner. A high-end fulfillment partner will develop an intimate understanding of your strategic vision and long-term goals so it can anticipate your needs.

6. Large distribution footprint

In the modern eCommerce market, a single fulfillment center is no longer enough. High-zone parcel shipments will substantially drive up shipping costs. Even if that weren’t the case, most eCommerce customers expect delivery within two days — which gets expensive when shipping to a national customer base from a single location. A highly-efficient fulfillment provider can strategically locate your inventory across a national footprint of warehouses to provide fast and affordable access to all of your customers.

Staci Americas: A Top-Performing Fulfillment Services Provider

At Staci Americas, we prioritize service, agility, communications, and partnership in every customer relationship. To see how we can help you build an efficient and responsive fulfillment operation, contact us today.