Shopify is an excellent platform for running a store. It can handle many of the day-to-day tasks for you, like keeping product pages updated, syncing inventory, and processing payments. This can save you time and energy.
But not everything is offered by Shopify. Like Shopify, by itself, does not help you package and ship your products. You have to do that yourself. This is okay for a small shop that only sells a few products each month. But if you want to grow and sell more products, this becomes unsustainable. That’s where automation comes in. Technology lets us use machines to do the work for us, which is excellent for a growing store.
But before deciding the automated fulfillment for your product just like China fulfillment, you have to look at various aspects of your business which are discussed below.
Determine About Your Situation
Every business needs a way to deliver its products to its customers. This system can be different for every type of business. If you are selling a physical product that you make yourself, you will need to think about going for a third party like you can ship the product to someone else. That person will then handle the inventory and send orders to customers.
If you are selling a product that is made in a factory in another country, you will need to use the process that the factory has set up. If you do not want to use their process, you can use a middleman to handle the order fulfillment process for you.
Knowing the order flow and how products move from manufacturing to shipping is important for setting up a fulfillment process. This will help you decide which of the following systems will work best for you.
Choose different fulfillment service
After the first step, you have to choose different fulfilments services according to your needs. There are different fulfillment services that can meet your needs. Here are some of the better ones to consider.
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Amazon Fulfilment:
Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA) is the most popular shipping and fulfillment system. Amazon, which is a large retailer with many distribution centers around the world, can handle your inventory and fulfill your products. They can also take care of the sale and returns.
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Shopify Fulfilment:
Shopify has been building its own fulfillment network to compete with Amazon. Like Amazon, Shopify has distribution centers across the country. These centers have product inventory and robotic assistants to help with organization and shipping. Prices for stores that want to use Shopify’s system are reasonable.
Activating a Fulfillment Service in Shopify
You will need to set up a fulfillment service once you have chosen one. This will involve the process that the fulfillment service requires, as well as linking it to your Shopify store. You cannot set up automatic fulfillment if you do not have fulfillment enabled.
Once you have registered an account and activated your chosen service, you need to go to the Shopify admin panel and open the setting and find the Shipping and Delivery section.
In this section, you will find a section called “Accounts and Integrations.” Under this, you will see several options. You have to click on the “Manage Integrations” button. This will bring up a box that says custom order fulfillment. Now you have to click a button for adding a fulfillment service. This will bring up a form. You will need the title of your fulfillment provider and their email address to fill out this form.
Now, you need to go to your product pages and make sure that they are set to be delivered by your new service. In the Inventory section, you have to select a fulfillment service you just added for each product which is present under the “inventory managed by” section. Now save it.
Now that you have this information, you are ready to go. When someone makes an order in your store, the order is sent as an email to your fulfillment service. They will process and ship the order. If you have multiple dropshipping suppliers or a mixture of products that includes both first-hand sales and third-party sales, choosing a fulfillment service per product can be helpful.
