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Once you’ve gotten your products made and you’ve succeeded in getting them shipped to you it’s important to have a place to put them. You’ll also need a place to break them down in individual customer orders and ship them to your customers. That brings us to your warehouse. There are two models to choose from. You can either hire a third party logistics provider to handle your inventory for you or process your inventory yourself.
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Outsourcing your inventory management in order processing can be a great way to take an enormous amount of work off your plate but it will be more expensive. You’ll also lose some control because your inventory is under lock and key at someone else’s location and not with you. Day and night there are several things to keep in mind when you outsource fulfillment you’re going to be charged in multiple different ways.
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For order per unit for stored for shipping in any other monthly fees it can really start to add up. 3 PM is usually charged between $1.50 to $3 per order and $0.25 to $1 for every unit above the first unit in each order. An important thing to remember is that the more orders you ship per month the lower your fees can go per order.
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So negotiate constantly. You’ll also get charged for storage. Many three pieces charge for storage at the pallet case and even bin level. It’s basically like paying rent for space in the warehouse. You can usually expect to pay $20 to $40 per pallet cases and bean prices will vary by location. So make sure to talk with your service provider
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to determine how much will be charged to rent this space. You’ll also be charged for the shipping costs related to getting your items to your customers. Charges usually are paid by your three people to your carriers and they’ll just add those to your monthly bill. This actually works in your favor though because since they ship a lot more volume than you will they can usually negotiate better rates with the carriers and pass those savings on to you.
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On top of paying for order processing, storage, and shipping you’ll also have other monthly fees that will vary by service provider. Some examples of those things basically like technology integration fees minimum order fees service fees receiving fees and other minimum monthly fees that might be added in addition to the per order fees you get charged monthly.
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One of the best features of working with a warehouse is that they can usually handle labor intensive tasks read things like barcode labeling each of your products bottling your products if they need bottling. Combining sets processing your returns and even placing inserts within each of your products. All these things will be extremely time consuming. If you did them yourself at 3 PM I would have staff on site that
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can handle something like that pretty quickly adjust the hourly rate because of all the fees that you’d be charged work with the three Po some people instead choose to do it themselves. Actually strongly recommend this if you’re just starting out is the best way to understand how your product safely get to your customers. In the case of returns how they safely make it back to you once you are consistently doing about 1 to 10 orders per day.
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That’s about the right time to start looking for a 3 PM service provider. Until then it’s better to just do it yourself. There is a catch though it will eat up a lot of your time because there are many things you have to do yourself like staying organized. I highly recommend setting up a dedicated space we can keep your items separated and organize the best
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way to organize your products is by keeping your best Sellers and the easiest to reach storage locations and you’ll be reaching for these most often and you don’t want to have to travel far every time you need one to have to reach for it. It’s also important try and keep them stored at waist height or above so you don’t have to bend over too far or reach up to hide access. Another way to stay organized create a dedicated packing
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station that is always ready for you to quickly prepare your products for shipment that has all the bags boxes tape and shipping labels you need within arm’s reach. There is nothing worse than having just one order to ship but all your boxes are stored on the other side of the house when it comes time to ship your orders you’ll start to use the same carriers shipping settings as shipping methods repeatedly utilize automation
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as much as possible. Most shipping tools allow you to set up predefined rules and settings that can modify your orders automatically to take a lot of repetitive manual work off your plate. If you’re e-commerce shopping cart doesn’t provide this feature, then I highly recommend using tools like shipping e.g. or ShipStation dock the last thing to keep in mind that you don’t want
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to be shipping yourself forever, especially if you plan to grow the amount of orders you’re selling per day to prepare as soon as possible to bring in helpers and paid staff the most costly operations any warehouse are picking and packing. So if you need to hire help that’s probably where your new hires will go. Make it easier for them on board quickly. This means having your stations properly set up and organized as well was clearly organizing your inventory.
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So they can learn your process fast may give you a quick story when I worked at amazon.com it was not uncommon for us to bring in hundreds of temporary workers just to our building for help during the holiday season while they were only there for six weeks. We spent months ahead of time preparing for their arrival. We were out at sl ps developed in class training developed
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on the floor training even chose trainers to work with groups of 10 people at a time for their entire first week we even had an entire team of people in the building whose only job all year long was developing training materials so workers could work safely and be more productive. The key to a successful warehouse operation is constantly improving the process as you grow ahead.
