November 18, 2016

You think that everything is going along so smoothly. You’ve sent Request for Proposals to at least three fulfillment vendors, and you expect that within the next two weeks you’ll have all the information you need to prepare your final marketing budget for the business case of your next big program. And then the phone calls and the questions start.

When your eCommerce business grows to the point where you can no longer package and ship the orders yourself, it’s time to begin outsourcing your order fulfillment. Although all order fulfillment centers offer the same basic services, their individual methods and costs will help you choose one over the other. When selecting an order fulfillment service, keep the following in mind:

You might think it’s out of the question to outsource order fulfillment because your product or your sales volume don’t require it. Why not reconsider? In the end it’s not always going to be more cost-effective to do your order fulfillment in-house.

With about 93 percent of all consumer Internet purchases made with credit cards, credit card frauds are on the rise. In fact, a Gartner survey of 100 Web retailers found Internet credit-card fraud to be much more common than offline fraud, making it the “No. 1 problem” in e-commerce.