All About Shopify Fulfillment And Dropshipping Services

The Shopify Fulfillment Network (SFN) effectively delivers orders to your customers. Sellers can store inventory near customers’ locations in fulfillment centers throughout the US and Canada. It helps to fulfill the orders quickly and at affordable shipping costs. Shopify Fulfillment service helps to handle the entire business data together with customer data, inventory levels, and shipment tracking all in one place.

Criteria to Check SFN Eligibility

Every seller needs to review the below criteria to check whether SFN is suitable for your business.

• The business caters to selling products in the United States.
• Sellers have less than 200 SKUs.
• Shipping of orders between 3 and 200 per day.
• You don’t sell any perishable or regulated items.

Once the inventory is prepared and sent to the network of fulfillment centers, it becomes their liability to pick, pack, and ship the products ordered by your customers. It frees up much of your time, thereby allowing you to focus on developing your business.

Getting Started with the Shopify Fulfillment Network

Before you start using the Shopify Fulfillment Network (SFN), you must equip your products and business within Shopify. Equipping your products in advance helps guarantees that the fulfillment centers are ready to take your inbound transfers, which gets your products ready for fulfillment faster.

Setting up Shopify Fulfillment Network

If you’re new to the Shopify Fulfillment Network, then follow these steps to get set up.

• Ensure that your products are qualified for the SFN.
• Allocate SKUs and barcodes to your items and their variants.
• Upload the products to the SFN app.
• Create inbound transfers.
• Finish packing and labeling items.
• Send the items to a Shopify Fulfillment Center location.
• Set shipping rates, profiles, and locations for the SFN in the Shipping section of Shopify admin

Using Fulfillment and Dropshipping Services

A fulfillment service is a third-party warehouse responsible for preparing and shipping your orders. By using fulfillment service, one does not have to handle all the shipping troubles, significantly when you have expanded beyond your current warehousing abilities or when manual shipping of items is not possible anymore. One can buy shipping labels from your Shopify admin for your most recent orders. There are two types of fulfillment services associated with Shopify fulfillment service.

• Custom Fulfillment Services

  With Shopify, sellers can use fulfillment service on the condition that the warehouse is capable of processing orders by email. If more contact is required, you can hire a Shopify expert to develop a custom Shopify inventory management and fulfillment app.

• Fulfillment by Amazon

  You can also use fulfillment by Amazon to store your inventory and fulfill orders from any Amazon-based fulfillment center. Before setting this up, having an Amazon Seller Central account is essential.

Shopify’s in-built Fulfillment by Amazon integration is accessible only to Amazon sellers who have Amazon Marketplace accounts for Canada and the United States based on the store currency. For example, if the store currency is set to CAD, then the Amazon Marketplace account should be for Canada. Else, the seller should set the Amazon Marketplace account for the United States. If the Amazon Marketplace account is for some other region, then a third-party app must be integrated for Fulfillment by Amazon.

Benefits of Shopify Fulfillment Service

Fulfillment services can drastically free up your time by handling your shipping and order fulfillment. Some services are even tied up with shipping carriers that provide lower shipping rates. Here are some of the significant benefits of using Shopify fulfillment.

• Forecasting your orders – Demand forecasting helps to be prepared for any deviation in your average orders. It helps to save money, uphold a positive customer experience, and be prepared to face changes in order volume. Moreover, it helps understand the impact of promotions or new products on overall order volumes preps you for key selling events, ensures customers experience fast shipping times, speeds up order processing, makes inventory decisions quickly, etc.
• Generate insightful reports – Shopify store has several sales, marketing, and inventory reports that can be used to track the order trends and sales volumes. Based on your store’s subscription plan, you will be given access to various reports like Sales finance reports, Average inventory sold per day, Sales over time, and Sales concerning marketing activities undertaken.
• Overview dashboard – A comprehensive dashboard provides detailed insights about your business. You can view your order detail, gather an accurate idea of your sales numbers, and find out your store’s average, and many more. It saves you much time from doing manual calculations, and as your business grows, you can gather all your information from one roof without any hassle of sifting through piles of paper.
• Manage inventory across all channels – It lets you handle everything about your inventory through all your sales channels such as Amazon, eBay, your website or shop, and more through Shopify inventory management.

Related Article: Shopify Inventory Management: Merits, Challenges, & Ways to Optimize

• Quick and easy shipping – The Shopify Fulfillment Center enables you to ship your products effortlessly while decreasing the overall costs and time taken for delivery. For example, setting up your fulfillment center or packaging system from scratch is not required.
• The Shopify Fulfillment uses great algorithms that help manage your inventory and associated tasks by sending real-time data and intelligent notifications.
• Your customer’s data is entirely controlled by you that can be used to enhance your overall customers’ experience.

For more information on Shopify inventory management and fulfillment service, get in touch with our experts now!