It’s that time of year again where we tighten our belts and commit ourselves to improving our lives in the coming year. How you go about improving your situation depends entirely on who you are now and who you want to be in the new year. If you own an e-commerce business, 2020 can be an amazing year if you follow through on these New Year’s Resolutions for e-commerce businesses.
1. Optimize Your Supply Chain
If you’re supply chain is anything like majority of e-commerce businesses, it likely consists of multiple far-flung suppliers, warehouses, fulfilment centers, and carriers trying to meet the needs of customers on the other side of the country.
As your business grows, so does the size and scale of your supply chain. The best way to enable further growth and improve the state of your supply chain in 2020 is to optimize it for max efficiency:
Minimize Travel Times – If your warehouse is in Maine but your customers are in Florida, then you pay thousands of dollars in needless logistics costs each year. It’s a far better allocation of resources to locate warehousing and fulfillment in Florida where you can ship product to your customers in far less time and for far less money.
Consolidate Shipments – If you ship partial shipments to the same warehouse every week, it’s more efficient to consolidate multiple partial shipments into one full shipment, thus minimizing the total number of shipments you have to pay to deliver.
Centralize Procurement – It’s much more efficient to source materials from a supplier near your manufacturing plant, than it is to ship the same materials across the country.
Crossdock – Crossdocking increases a supply chain’s overall efficiency by enabling shippers to ship full truckloads to a single cross dock for distribution, thereby minimizing touch points between pick-up and final delivery.
2. Implement an Omnichannel Fulfillment Strategy
One way to improve your supply chain in 2020 is to implement an omnichannel fulfillment strategy that encompasses your entire fulfillment process – from order placement to final delivery.
This helps to ensure inventory is fully available to every channel that you service (e-commerce, wholesale, in-store replenishment, etc.) and enables a seamless experience for every customer across every channel.
3. Plan Ahead and Be Proactive
If 2019 was the year you were “flying by the seat of your pants” then 2020 should be the year you take a proactive approach to supply chain management. A good plan is the heart of any profitable supply chain because good plans minimize risk, improve efficiency, and maximize revenue.
By planning well in 2020 and addressing any potential issues and possible contingencies, you can effectively eliminate the possibility of any supply chain delays and improve your chances of running a more efficient, streamlined operation.
4. Hire a Third-Party Logistics Provider (3PL)
Let’s face it. You could implement these new year’s resolutions and see drastic improvements over the next six months to a year, or you could outsource the job to a 3PL and see the improvements immediately.
Unless you’re Walmart or Amazon, your business likely does not have the millions of dollars it will cost to optimize and overhaul your entire supply chain. That’s where a third-party logistics provider (3PL) comes in handy.
Whereas the focus of your business is likely the sale of a product, the focus of a 3PL is to manage, optimize, and supplement your supply chain with outsourced warehousing, fulfillment, and transportation services.
A 3PL will not only optimize your supply chain with logistics expertise, it will supplement the services you already provide and enable your customers with services that were previously unavailable to them, such as expedited and same-day delivery.
As the premium on-demand warehousing, fulfillment, and third-party logistics provider in the country, we have the network, resources, expertise, and buying power to optimize your supply chain for maximum efficiency, revenue, and customer satisfaction. Request more information today so you can get jump start the New Year resolutions for e-commerce businesses.
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