Time management

• So when your product ships from overseas you basically do not touch them or handle them at all when you use fulfillment.  You pay a monthly fee per pallet that covers the storage and a freight charge for shipping the product out.  Most fulfillment businesses ship a lot of packages and are willing to pass some of the savings on to you.
• So basically you do not handle your product at all from the time it leaves the manufacturer to the time it arrives to the customer.  This in itself is much better for most business owners in the long run.
• You have to individually crunch your own numbers to see if it will work for you.  You also need to take into account that your product needs to be a complete unit for the fulfillment scenario to work best.  If you have to combine products or do any type of assembly, it takes away from the profit scenario and increases costs.
• Typical storage charges can be from $8 per pallet to $20 per pallet, depending on where they are stored.

Shipping costs

Another factor is shipping costs.  You do not want to pay full retail shipping to your fulfillment company that is just wrong.  A 20% discount to new customers is not unheard of with a decent volume of shipping.  If you have a fulfillment center centrally located in the country, then you can ship to either the west coast or the east cost with reasonable costs.  If your center is on either cost, you have higher costs when sending to the opposite coast.  For example, if your fulfillment is in California, and you ship to New York, then that is going to cost you more to send a box than it would to Arizona.  Having an office centrally located is a good advantage over time.

Summary

Personally I have done both types of shipping discussed in this article.  I may have switched to fulfillment sooner, had I known some of the details discussed here.  Depending on what type of ecommerce store you run, it may be necessary to use a combination of both types.  Larger operations use more than one fulfillment center to handle shipments.  Usually they have one on each coast to take advantage of the shipping cost savings.  Finding the right system for you involves a bit of homework and some brainstorming.  This is a small price to pay for not being held hostage to all the details of shipping your product to your customer.

Ecommerce Shipping and Fulfillment Part 1

Ecommerce Shipping and Fulfillment Part 2

I divide my time into what I call “high value” and “low value” activities. High value generate cash and low value does not. Certain things in the day have to be done whether they are low value or not, such as answer or read email. Here is my order, hopefully someone can get some value out of it.

1. Plan my goals for the day
2. Assign the goals in order that will generate cash. For example, on my ecommerce site, I want to add new products or improve my descriptions, so that I can sell more. This leads to more sales.
3. Promote and market said products by my marketing plan. My plan consists of a mix of SEO tactics such as bookmarking, article marketing and video marketing. These three give me the best results and thus land in the    high value category. this also includes managing anyone that I have outsourced to do some of these plans.
4. Ship or prep product, since I sold it, it needs to go out. This is sometimes outsourced by employee or anyone I can pawn it off on.
5. Add a new post to one of my blogs. This keeps things moving and i am big on moving projects forward.
6. Fix Problems, could be a customer service thing or other assorted pains.
7. Answer emails or phone calls.
8. Clean off my desk. ( I hate this)
9. Clean up my office. ( I hate this more, but if I get to absorbed into promotion my workspace gets trashed and then i cant work)
10. Plan for tomorrow. I am a list maker, if I can get something down on paper and hang it on clip boards or on my white board, this helps me tremendeously. I have four clip boards that I label. One is called “problems” the second is ‘warehouse”, third is “projects” and the fourth is “misc” I also have a huge white board in which I track a lot of progress and think outloud on.

I hope this helps someone.  The Plan changes a lot, but I use this basic outline.
Ken