What is Apparel Fulfilment and How Do You Handle Packing and Shipping?
When planning to launch a new clothing store, you can’t help but have a lot on your mind.
How do you get packing materials? How do you handle shipments, and what shipping service should you use exactly? What about returns?
Boy, that’s too much to think about, isn’t it? Unfortunately, you can’t escape it. Without a solid fulfillment strategy, your business will tank. Of course, this also applies to established brands – you need to have fulfillment well figured out to succeed in business.
What Is Apparel Fulfillment?
Fulfillment, generally, refers to the process of storing, picking, packing, and shipping orders to customers. It also encompasses return, which involves receiving items that customers reject.
Inherently, apparel fulfillment connotes how apparel businesses handle fulfillment.
Why Does Efficient Fulfillment Matter for Your Business?
- Minimized shipping errors: Fixing shipping errors is costly. Doing it repeatedly can harm your brand, hence why you need an efficient fulfillment process.
- Better customer satisfaction: If your customers are happy with your business, they will readily come back to buy a lot more.
- Better tracking: Making it easy for customers to track their orders helps foster brand trust.
- Improved space utilization: Fulfillment starts from your warehouse shelves and bins. Getting it right means better space utilization and, hence, lower operational costs.
- Better inventory management: An efficient fulfillment operation can also go a long way in improving inventory management.
How to Handle Packing and Shipping for Your Online Store
Picking, packing, and shipping customers’ orders can be a bit overwhelming at first, especially if you are new to the business. Ironically, established brands also struggle with this sometimes, too.
Nonetheless, it doesn’t have to be that way. Here are some tips to streamline your fulfillment operations.
Make It Easy to Pick Items From Your Storage/Warehouse
Whether you store inventory in your basement or a warehouse, it’s important to make it easy to retrieve items when orders come in.
Often, this involves putting items into bins, shelves, and slots, based on their order of priority. For instance, you can put fast-moving items into easy-to-reach bins, while the slower ones in the rear.
We suggest you check out this post to learn more about optimizing your storage space to streamline order picking.
Implement Barcodes
When starting, it’s easy to use a pen and paper to pick items from your storage. But as your business grows, this approach would become impractical due to higher chances of picking the wrong item.
One sure way to minimize mispicks is to use barcodes together with scanners. You can purchase them via GS1 or use generator tools like Cognex(mostly for internal use).
As for barcode scanners, you can easily purchase one from Amazon.
Learn more about barcodes here.
Purchase Shipping Labels and Boxes
Shipping labels contain vital information about products in transit, such as the receiver’s address, product weight, tracking information, etc. Without a shipping label, carriers will struggle to deliver orders to your customers, so you must create and attach them to the shipping boxes.
For shipping boxes, you can get them for free from carriers such as UPS, FedEx, DHL, etc. Alternatively, you could purchase them from Amazon, Walmart, or through any other delivery supplies vendor.
Sign Up With a Shipping Platform
Purchasing shipping labels, finding the right carrier, and figuring out how to secure shipping boxes can be extremely time-consuming and can limit business growth. Ideally, you will want someone else to handle this part of your business while you focus on improving product offerings and driving business growth.
This is where shipping platforms come into play. We will go over a few of the best ones shortly.
Completely Outsource to a 3PL
While shipping platforms handle a part of your apparel fulfillment process, third-party logistics providers, or 3PL for short, handle virtually every aspect of it.
You can learn more about 3PLs here.
Top Shipping Platforms for Apparel Businesses
Here are some of the top apparel fulfilment solutions you should consider for your business.
- Uphance: Uphance is a full-fledged ERP solution for apparel businesses that, among other things, simplifies order fulfillment.
- ShipEngine: ShipEngine makes it easy to build shipping APIs to streamline your fulfillment operations.
- ShipBob: ShipBob is a fulfillment service that doubles as a 3PL provider. With numerous fulfillment centers spread across the world, you can comfortably rely on ShipBob to deliver products to your customers no matter where they may be.
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