What Are the Pros and Cons of Using a Fulfillment Center?

What are the pros and the cons of using a fulfillment center?

So, actually the pros and the cons are going to be offsetting on this. So, I’ll just kind of go through them in order.

So, number one is going to be control. Control is absolutely a con on the fulfillment center because when you use a fulfillment center, there are so many things that are outside of your control and it’s so important for you to be able to have communication with your fulfillment company because your customers are going to order something and then they’re going to phone call you and say, “Hey, can you ship that out two days service?” Well, it it’s very easy for you to do when you’re at home because you control all that. You’re shipping yourself. But trying to communicate that to fulfillment center through email, text process can be very difficult and it’s going to be so many things. So absolutely having the extra control by doing it yourself is a great benefit from the fulfillment center.

Now another thing number two would be your inventory. When you’re home doing it on your inventory you’re you can look and see hey how much you got of something and when you run out you’ll take it off your website. You don’t have that type of issue.

When you do a fulfillment company. They’re gonna be have their inventory. Now they’re going to have like JAG. We have a fulfillment system. you can log in and see your inventory so you can see, but it’s never quite as clean because you’ll end up, you know, having inventory to have to check it or you’re going to have to call them up and say, “Hey, you know, am I out of this?” And you’ll find out that’s very difficult for you to always know exactly where you’re at inventory because you really don’t want to run out. So, inventory control is definitely a pro for home because you can easily see what you’ve got and a con for doing on your system.

Now, when you talk about that, let’s talk about quality control. So that’s really a pro for the fulfillment centers and the con for the for when you’re shipping it for your home because you’re going to find that fulfillment centers, they’re going to have some QC processes. They’re going to have SOPs.

For example, when an order comes in to JAG, one person pulls it, another person signs off on it, we photograph the order to make sure it’s right, we got a record of it. We’ve got a procedure and most fulfillment companies are going to have procedures they’re going to do.

When you’re at home and you’re doing yourself, you’re going to have the the the the wife is taking is filling the orders and taking them and shipping them. There’s and and then you got very different how often you go to to drop them off. So, you have much less processes when you’re doing it yourself, which can also hurt your overall quality.

All right, your next one is your turnaround time. This is normally going to be a, it can be a pro or con, depending on your fulfillment center, but normally whenever you uh have a fulfillment center do it for you, they’re going to give you a 99% guarantee that’s going to ship by this pertinent time.

And you’re going to find out that having a quick turnaround of your products is a very good pro for fulfillment centers because what’s going to happen at home is you’re going to go and you’re going to run it to the post office and then as soon as you get back, another order just came in. You go, “Oh, I don’t want to go to the post office again.” So you’re going to delay a day. So you’re going to have a usually if you got a good fulfillment company, they’re going to get it out quicker.

Now the final one is cost. Pro and con and of course this can go most people would say it’s a pro to do it yourself because you don’t have to pay fulfillment fees, pick and pack fees, storage fees, all the fees with fulfillment center. So absolutely con could be a pro for working from home. But also the cost could be a a pro on fulfillment side because again if your time is worth more to your business for you building the business than for you doing the fulfillment, then it’s going to be able to better to have the cost on fulfillment center side. So that one can be a pro or a con either way depending on how you do.

But remember if you want to scale you’re going to need to have a fulfillment company because as you grow from one order to 10 orders to 100 orders a day you’re going to be able to do it.

So again, almost everyone a pro on one and a con is on the other. But again, make sure you have the right ask the right questions and work with a company that’s going to be a good fit for you.