Every eCommerce business owner’s favourite pastime is searching for ways to save money and improve efficiency. Because ultimately, it translates into profits.
One way to do that is to outsource your order fulfilment to a pick and pack service. It saves you a lot of time and money, especially if you have a large number of orders to complete daily.
So, in this article, let’s see how this service can actually benefit your business.
How do Pick and Pack Services Work?
Once you sign up for a pick and pack service, you’ll send your inventory to their warehouse. Once your inventory arrives, they will scan it into their system, so they know what items are available.
Here’s how it works—instead of fulfilling orders yourself, you send your inventory to a good pick-and-pack facility.
When an order comes in, pick and pack services will pick the items from your inventory and pack them up for shipping. Hence the name ‘pick and pack.’
You will only pay for the orders that are fulfilled, so you don’t have to worry about storage fees. Plus, most pick and pack services offer discounts on shipping, which can save you even more money.
Strategies to Pick and Pack
Pick and pack fulfilment can be done in a variety of ways by businesses. Picking, for example, may be done using various tactics, such as:
- Zone picking: Employees pick and pack orders depending on their “zone” in the warehouse. That’s why it’s called zone picking.
Once a picker has completed their share of the picking list, they send it along to the next picker on the next site. It continues so on and so forth until the order reaches the packing workstation.
Zone picking is very efficient but involves complicated coordination among numerous warehouse employees. So, it is more suitable for major eCommerce businesses than smaller ones.
- Piece picking: An employee picks and packs one order at a time in this process. Piece picking is a basic, uncomplicated, and effective method of picking and packing. It’s helpful for smaller businesses that control their warehouse operations. But, it isn’t very easy for bigger eCommerce businesses with high incoming orders.
- Batch picking: Instead of picking and packing orders one at a time, warehouse employees pick items in batches and deliver them to packing workstations all at once. This strategy allows eCommerce merchants to increase picker efficiency and ship many orders at once.
- Wave picking: Wave picking blends the greatest aspects of batch and zone picking. Workers pick and pack orders in batches within their allocated zone before passing them onto pickers in the next zone.
This pick and pack process is appropriate for businesses of all sizes, although, like zone picking, it demands a good level of coordination that may be more accessible to bigger eCommerce shops.
Similarly, to handle quality control and make the shipping process as simple as possible, packaging can be planned using efficient strategies such as:
- An effective warehouse management system
- Decreasing the number of boxes
- Selecting the appropriate packing material for each product, and so on.
Nothing is small in a business. Every decision, idea, and strategy matters!
The Advantages of Pick and Pack Services
There are several benefits to using a pick and pack service, including:
- You will save time on fulfilment because you won’t have to do it yourself. Other professionals will do it on your behalf.
- You will save money on shipping because most pick-and-pack services offer discounts.
- Your inventory will be stored safely in a climate-controlled warehouse.
- You can focus on other aspects of your business since you won’t have to worry about fulfilment.
- You will see a higher level of customer satisfaction because of accurate order fulfilment and punctual, damage-free delivery.
- You will be able to cut the need for middlemen. Thus, the entire process is simplified.
- You will achieve less human effort, less waste, and higher cost-effectiveness.
- You will get the best out of kitting services, which is packaging products that are separate items into one group before delivering them.
Conclusion
Finally, one last piece of advice; even with pick and pack services, adopt practices that suit your business requirements. Even the most impressive business strategy becomes useless if it doesn’t help your business.
So, if you are also looking for ways to save time and money on order fulfilment, consider using pick-and-pack services. And to ensure its smooth execution, keep the below points in mind.
- Choose a pick-and-pack technique that is best for your company.
- Determine the best inventory organisation plan.
- Items should be arranged in a way that reduces contact throughout the selection and packing process.
- Introduce automation whenever possible.
- Investing in a warehouse management system (WMS) is a good idea.
In this way, you can take advantage of this business strategy. Once again, with pick-and-pack services, you can focus on other aspects of your business while they take care of fulfiling orders for you.
