Hi guys, doing some research for my friend’s proposed site and I’m wondering about order fulfillment and warehousing. I’m in Canada but would like my my warehouse to be located in the US. I found some companies like bongous, duplium, and dare and trying to find more. Can anyone point me in the direction of reputable warehousing/order fulfillment company that will deal with the small guy? Who do you use? All help is much appreciated.
I have worked with a couple of different fulfillment companies over the years, but my current favorite is Xpertfulfillment.com
They are startup friendly, and don’t overcharge low volume shippers…
I know they do a lot of business with clients located in Canada that want to sell products in the US.
Hope that helps.
You may also want to take a look at shipwire.com which has a fairly slick system and offers some flexibility for the true startup.
There are a bunch of em one being BongoUS, Shipito, Viaddress, MyUS etc. I have found Bongo and mysus to be the most expensive of them all. Had read on one of the posts here about Shipito and actually did business with them…I like them, they are cheap and easy to deal with. Take a look and see which one suits your business the best!
Amazon.com also offers fulfillment services and in many cases you can also offer products for sale on their site as well.
Can also try out ebay.
Meh on Amazon…too many horror stories and lost inventory seems to be the “norm”.
What about international ones, anyone?
A big challenge with 3rd party fulfillment is the
back end management.
A good shoppingcart will have this built in already
because if you have to count on downloading a CSV
of your orders and then sending this sheet to the
fulfillment company daily it will quickly become a
nightmare.
Plus, you will need to perform reconciliation of your
cart of the orders shipped versus ordered.
It’s not a common topic for fulfillment companies
to bring up but this is a huge problem …so make sure
the fulfillment functionality is built into your cart system
or plan on a lot of manual work …which negates the
reason of outsourcing in the 1st place.
…and before choosing a fulfillment company, make sure
you ask them how many orders do not get shipped… if
tell you zero …you’re likely getting a less than honest
answer unless they have a fully integrated solution to
your specific cart.