E-commerce fulfilment is the biggest component of selling online because it is your initial point of contact with your customers. The reason is that your first impression has the potential to make or break your company. Therefore, you must provide quick order delivery to gratify your customers. It is here that multi-warehousing strategy helps in keeping your business stay at par by ensuring quick e-commerce fulfilment while also lowering costs.
This article will help you learn what inventory splitting is and how it benefits an e-commerce brand in terms of e-commerce fulfilment.
What is inventory splitting or distributed inventory?
The distribution of physical items over different fulfilment facilities that are carefully chosen to maintain inventory closer to the final customer is known as distributed inventory. This way, when it’s time to ship, the products will be close by, resulting in a shorter transit time and lower transportation expenses.
Benefits of splitting inventory into multiple fulfilment warehouses
Following are the benefits of distributing inventory in multiple warehouses:
1. Reduces shipping costs and helps in quick order delivery
Customers are spread throughout numerous zones. Naturally, you may receive orders from any place and any one of them. While delivering e-commerce orders to several cities from a single location will incur zonal and national shipping rates. Distributed inventory, on the other hand, will provide a stable infrastructure throughout your e-commerce supply chain. Shipping from a nearby e-commerce warehouse minimizes transit time, allowing you to provide lightning-fast delivery.
2. Minimizes risk during emergencies
It’s better to be prepared than be sorry when it comes to your orders being delayed. But when you distribute your inventory, it allows you to limit losses in the event of a catastrophic occurrence, such as a natural disaster, by limiting them to the impacted e-commerce fulfillment warehouses. As a result, even if some of your goods are tampered with, you will always have multiple backups.
3. Rank better in search pages of marketplaces
When a customer searches for a product, the marketplace lists the results in order of the highest to the lowest rankings. The order in which your product appears is determined by this ranking algorithm. And the speed with which an order is delivered to a customer is one of the most heavily weighted elements for any product rating. As such, distributing your inventory across various fulfilment centers increases your product’s visibility and boosts your overall sales.
4. Opens doors to new markets
You can reach out to new markets by using numerous fulfilment facilities in any country. For instance, if your inventory is available in point A, it is quite possible that you already have a consumer base in that area. But when your products are stored in point B, you should begin to generate brand awareness in that area. This will help you in locating potential consumers in various parts of the country.
Many online retailers send their merchandise to multiple warehouses to compete in the dynamic e-commerce industry. Based on your clients’ addresses, a good, outsourced order fulfilment company can assist you in determining the best fulfilment centre locations for your organisation. DHL Express is one such logistics provider service that will help in easing your international deliveries without any hassle and on time.