PART 3
Choosing the right partner can make or break your company’s logistics, customer service, and repeat purchases. Using a fulfillment center like ºÚ°µ±¬ÁÏÍø frees you from navigating the fulfillment landscape with zero stress. Below are some insights on how ºÚ°µ±¬ÁÏÍø can take your business to the next level.
Most of the important factors when choosing a fulfillment center are understanding the company’s software because at the end of the day it all comes down to how well the technology integrates and works with your retail store. Logistics tends to be one of the most neglected segments of the whole eCommerce journey. It never is the highlight or the feature, it’s unglamorous but many companies underestimate how important it is until it becomes a problem. We sat down with ºÚ°µ±¬ÁÏÍø’s Solutions Architect and eCommerce Specialist, Dean Bentley-Falcke for a 3 part series on how to better understand what questions you should be asking when considering a potential partnership with a fulfillment solution.
How does ºÚ°µ±¬ÁÏÍø’s platform support clients who are decentralized from work during COVID-19?
ºÚ°µ±¬ÁÏÍø has always allowed for a fantastic web-based experience for our clients. We have clients that operate in multiple countries and multiple time zones, ºÚ°µ±¬ÁÏÍø is a company that has also made changes due to COVID-19 with the majority of our headquarters staff working remotely from home. ºÚ°µ±¬ÁÏÍø has made sure that our platform is easy to use and makes sense, we are perfectly positioned for customers whose clients who have never used eCommerce retail markets and have now discovered that eCommerce is critical due to the COVID-19 shutdowns. ºÚ°µ±¬ÁÏÍø helps new eCommerce store owners answer some of the questions around how do we deal without physical stores? Starting in eCommerce is a fantastic new avenue for them to sell and where people have been sluggish to move into eCommerce, are now jumping in. We’ve had this sort of perfect moment where the Shopify platform has come leaps and bounds over the years and they are a very important partner for us at ºÚ°µ±¬ÁÏÍø, any client who makes the call to go for a platform like Shopify has almost automatic access to ºÚ°µ±¬ÁÏÍø as a Fulfillment partner. This has become a revolutionary point where you as a small business can compete in the market with the giants like Amazon and Walmart. The great thing about Shopify is that anybody can join no matter how small you are or no matter how few products you might be selling. Nothing is stopping you from taking advantage of a world-class eCommerce platform like Shopify and now you’ve got access to world-class fulfillment, which is ºÚ°µ±¬ÁÏÍø. It’s a great time for anyone to enter the eCommerce space and you don’t have to have a massive I.T. systems operation and all this money to spend on set up, you can get set up very quickly with very little. In today’s current pandemic world this so critical and that’s why in a way there’s been so much buzz around platforms like Shopify, because we all starting to see the potential and if you’re a small boutique anywhere in the U.S. or Canada, suddenly North America and the whole world can become your sales-front. This pandemic has forced us to rethink how we do business.
How do I safeguard? How do I get out there? How do I conduct my business without my physical storefront? What now?
With something like Shopify and our integrations using ºÚ°µ±¬ÁÏÍø, we have solutions for thousands of businesses out there who are looking for this kind of platform. One future trend that we are seeing is the rise of social media stores; Facebook as an organization is also taking the fight, they’re throwing their hat in the ring– You’re seeing much tighter integrations with platforms like Instagram and Facebook themselves, they want people and they want advertisers to go beyond just putting simple banner ads on their platforms, they want to integrate your whole storefront into that Instagram or Facebook experience. Instagram has always been primed for this, it has got a great visual medium if you’re showcasing photos of your latest apparel, you’ve already got someone right there who is in the market, why not just be able to check out seamlessly on Instagram without having to leave the platform. That’s going to be the next trend as well in the next couple of years. We are very used to the web-based storefronts but there’s still a big focus on mobile and how we get people transacting on mobile. Amazon does have their mobile apps, you’ve seen a lot of big-box retailers as well launch their apps. Apps are a way of controlling the whole experience, what we’re trying to do here is make the whole checkout experience as seamless as possible. Shopify can remember your payment information so no matter which Shopify store you check out on, they will automatically allow unified payment processing, even though you are dealing with a brand new Shopify store that you’ve never interacted with; those are the kinds of innovations that make people spend more money and time online, consumers don’t have to go rummaging around in their wallets for credit card numbers, you’ve got the confidence that it’s safe and secure.
COVID-19 and eCommerce, what is the correlation?
COVID-19 has triggered this focus on eCommerce with several solutions that are now coming into play. Social media is becoming more than just a photo-sharing and message sharing center, we are looking for the movement of full eCommerce retail solutions into social media and that is going to be a hot trend for the next couple of years.
How can retailers compete?
I think what we’ve generally seen around social media and Shopify is that there’s a whole bunch of companies that play a vital role in enriching eCommerce. What’s always going to be important here is that the service and platform make life easier and that fits in nicely with ºÚ°µ±¬ÁÏÍø in that ºÚ°µ±¬ÁÏÍø integrates with multiple platforms, whether it be Amazon, Shopify, Walmart, and so on. We can ship to Malta, we can ship across the globe. We can handle returns from any returns processing platform. One thing we offer clients is a centralized performance so irrespective of how you decide to sell on Instagram or through Shopify or Facebook or Amazon or Walmart, ºÚ°µ±¬ÁÏÍø has got you. ºÚ°µ±¬ÁÏÍø’s big underlying story here is that one of the key reasons for dealing with Shopify at the forefront of dealing with ºÚ°µ±¬ÁÏÍø is you’ve got one place, you have one software to work with, you will have one ºÚ°µ±¬ÁÏÍø account manager. It makes the client’s life so much easier to deal with because their not having to worry about multiple fulfillments, multiple warehouses of stock–there are lots of things ºÚ°µ±¬ÁÏÍø can bring to the table to help give people that unified eCommerce fulfillment platform.
ºÚ°µ±¬ÁÏÍø sets your business on autopilot and combines flexible, reliable fulfillment with powerful, real-time technology. ºÚ°µ±¬ÁÏÍø has multiple fulfillment centers across the US and Canada– making it easy to manage your eCommerce business. For more information on how to set your business on autopilot, contact one of our fulfillment specialists today.
