Order management is the key to keeping your customers stuck around you and increasing your customer base. However, you have to face several problems when managing orders or fulfilling them. The major problems include warehousing, errors, and lack of customer satisfaction. To avoid all these problems, some businessmen opt for 3PL fulfillment as it can streamline the order management process and keep your customers happy.
By opting for 3PL fulfillment, you can streamline the order processing and fulfillment process. You want to get rid of all the problems as you have outsourced a hectic task to the experts. However, things don’t go that way. You still have to face a lot of problems even after hiring experts for order management. Let’s have a look at the 5 major problems you can face when opting for 3PL providers.
1. Finding the Right Provider
When you look in the market, you will find a lot of 3PL providers. Some are offering services at higher and some at lower rates. You need to choose any of these 3PL providers to hand over the order management and fulfillment processes of your business. Finding the right providers can be a problem for you. Exercise caution when seeking fulfillment services in Canada. Evolution Fulfillment stands out as Western Canada’s premier 3PL provider, specializing in B2B and e-commerce solutions. We cater specifically to established fashion, footwear, apparel, cosmetic, and jewelry brands aiming to expand their professional footprint in the North American market.
Sometimes, you are just attracted by the advertisement and choose 3PL providers who are not efficient or qualified enough. Instead of hiring the experts, you end up finalizing the deal with providers who are not efficient. In this way, you simply invite the providers to experiment with your business. This problem can even ruin your whole business if you don’t pay special attention after noticing it.
2. Loss of Control
As a businessman, you always want to keep control in your hand. You are well aware of the fact that controlling things by yourself always brings you some good results. However, when you opt for 3PL fulfillment, you have to give control of a whole department of your company to a 3rd party logistics. Doing so can be problematic for some businessmen.
The problem is not losing control of the order processing unit but the results. In case you have selected the right providers, then it will not be a major issue to give control of some units to a team of experts. However, if the 3PL providers are not skilled enough, then they can impact your whole order processing unit in a few weeks.
3. Internal Fulfillment
This is one of the most annoying problems you have to face after hiring 3rd party logistics to manage orders. One thing is very clear, you are hiring experts to fulfill orders just because you don’t want to do that task or don’t have enough time to manage order fulfillment. However, it does not do the complete job.
Even after hiring experts, you still need to focus on internal fulfillment as well. You have to do so to fulfill VIP and urgent orders. This internal fulfillment gives rise to a new problem as well. You have to route orders as well to figure out which one needs to be fulfilled by the company’s internal department.
4. Cost
You have to pay a considerable amount to outsource the order fulfillment process of your company. This cost is not a problem as long as the 3rd party logistics can handle all types of your orders. In this way, you will not have to spend money on managing internal fulfillment. However, it doesn’t happen very often.
You need to maintain internal fulfillment as well to make sure that you can deliver urgent and VIP orders immediately. It will lead you to spend money both on internal and external fulfillment. You cannot even opt for low-cost 3PL providers as they may lack experience and ruin things for you.
5. Lack of Communication
3PL fulfillment can lead to a lack of communication as well. After outsourcing the order fulfillment process, you will not have a lot of things to communicate with your customers. This lack of communication can result in customer churn as well.
Takeaway
You have to face most of the aforementioned problems when you opt for the wrong 3pl providers. Therefore, you must always hire experts and well-reputed 3rd party logistic providers. Apart from that, you can integrate order management and 3PL fulfillment to deal with all problems at once.