Should I Outsource Fulfillment Or Keep It In House?

Should I outsource fulfillment or keep it in house?

This is one of the first questions that come up for small businesses trying to decide whether they should do all their own shipping or have someone else do it for them.

And it really comes down to three things that you need to be concerned with: Control, your time, and the price.

So, let’s talk about control first.

When you do things in house and ship it, you have complete control over everything. You can control the packaging. You can control when you ship it. You control the labeling. You can you can control exactly when it’s going to get to the customer. Really, everything is in your hands and in your control. And that may be really important to you.

Let me tell you a quick story. JAG Alliance, back in 2020, we used to outsource all of our fulfillment. And the problem we found is that we had control of almost nothing in the process once the order was placed. And for us that created a lot of problems because our 3PL that we were using wouldn’t have a hard time getting back with us. They would label things wrong, package things incorrectly or driving off customers. And so that was the reason we started our own fulfillment company back in 2021, so we could do all of our own fulfillment. And so that’s something for you.

How much control do you need? If you’ve got a complicated shipping process or complicated products, you may want to have the complete control of it. If you got a simple process, it’s not. So that’s number one to control.

Number two is really and number three kind of go together and that goes with time and price.

Now, if you’re shipping things yourself, you’re going to be spending time doing it because not only do you have to package, ship, you’ve got to drive to the UPS store, drive to the post office store, and stand there in line and wait to ship your packages. And at some point in time, you’re going to figure out, all right, how much time am I spending per week doing that? And what is my time worth to me?

So, for example, let’s suppose you spend, you know, two or three hours a week going back and forth to the post office. If you’re if you spend that two or three hours growing your business and having someone else fulfill it, that’s probably a better use of your time because that way you can you should be really growing and marketing your business.

Now, on the other hand, cost that’s also important. You’re going to as you get quotes from all the different companies, they’re going to range anywhere from a few dollars to thousands of dollars.

So think about think about it is if you’re just getting started, you probably don’t may ship 10 packages a week or less. If you ship 10 or less packages a week, then probably your monthly fulfillment fees if you were doing it here with JAG would be less than $100 a month.

So if you’re if it’s worth a $100 a month in your time to grow your business, you should probably be outsourcing the fulfillment.

What I would encourage you to do is click on the link and get us to do a quote for you. And that way you can see based on your volume, your size, how much it’s going to cost for you to ship.

But more than likely, it’s going to be very affordable and be a great movement for you.