” Seasonal Flexibility
Outsourcing order fulfillment allows retailers to avoid the need to hire and train temps or buy new scales, lifts, or the like. Instead, the retailer simply needs to ensure that the product is in the fulfillment service’s warehouse, and trust the service provider to worry about extra hands and tools. In this way, the merchant has complete seasonal flexibility. When holiday sales are rolling in, the fulfillment service manages the surge. When sales are slower in January, there is no idle equipment — or excess employees to let go.

Choosing a fulfillment service gives merchants the opportunity to covert some of their fixed costs, like rent, heating and cooling, and similar, into variable costs — expenses that go up and down in relationship to sales — which in turn can do very good things for cash flow.

Focus on What You Do Best

Often online entrepreneurs start businesses because they have a passion for the product or a passion for marketing, but, it is relatively less common that someone or some group starts a tee shirt business or an online hardware store because she feels especially gifted at stacking or packing boxes. To be sure, operations managers that can smoothly handle this part of the business are in high demand, but they tend not to be as common in small ecommerce start-ups.

Using a fulfillment service for many retailer business owners is an opportunity to outsource many unfamiliar tasks and focus on what one does best.”