Product damage during kitchen appliance delivery, storage, and order management is a pain in the bottom line. When you want to protect your margins and reputation with customers, it’s time to find a reliable 3PL that can handle your kitchen appliances safely and securely.
Red Stag Fulfillment has expertise in heavy appliance delivery support thanks to three amazing warehouse locations staffed with high-quality people. They’re our secret to ensuring that fulfillment and storage help your business instead of draining operations. But, are our people right for you? What about teams and processes at other 3PLs? To answer that, you’ve got to ask a few more questions. Here are five to get you started finding the right partner for kitchen fulfillment and appliance delivery.
1. Is warehousing kitchen appliances safely a challenge?
Every product can be offloaded, stored, and used in fulfillment safely if your 3PL is patience, diligent, and provides needed people, training, and equipment. What you want is a company that understands your products’ needs and is willing to invest to meet those needs.
At Red Stag, we take a custom approach to all products stored in our facilities. Teams learn your products and how to manage them. That way, we move everything from container and truck to racking or pallet storage appropriately. From there, we have specific pick and pack instructions for your goods. This keeps items safe and secure at every step throughout appliance delivery.
Kitchen appliances can be heavy, bulky, and sometimes a little awkward when it comes to weight and balance. To keep those safe, our experts use handcarts, forklifts, and team lifting. We employ best practices to move products in a way that keeps them secure without risking harm to our team. We’re the big, bulky, heavy experts, so that means we can help you protect margins, sales, and goods.
Partners who have switched to us experienced a 93.6%-100% reduction in monthly inventory loss or damage.
2. How do you keep my goods safe during appliance delivery and storage?
It all starts with training and prep work. Our experts focus on heavy, big, bulky, and high-value goods, which covers almost everything you’ll sell for your shoppers’ kitchens. We train in protecting goods, team lifting, using carts and forklifts, and leaving enough room for products to be moved and safely stored.
Red Stag also reviews requirements so that we store your goods in ways to keep them safe and secure. Your packaging or that provided by the OEM can be a big benefit here, allowing us to store your goods safely. When there are other considerations — we know stainless steel needs to be kept safe from abrasion — our experts will come up with a plan for each SKU. Wrapping, padding, packaging, and storing goods with plenty of clearance space will keep them safe in the warehouse. From there, our experts also learn how to safely move goods so they remain free from damage during any part of the storage and fulfillment process.
Our efforts to keep goods safe during appliance delivery come from the prep work we do in the warehouse. Red Stag experts work with each company to help secure goods and package them safely for transport. Many appliances come in secure packaging from the manufacturing process. If that’s the case for you, we may ship it safely in that package or add an overbox for additional cushion. We make you whole for any shrinkage that occurs during our efforts, plus we help partners work with carriers to minimize damage or recoup when necessary.
3. What’s different for heavy products that I sell?
Heavy goods have their own consideration at every point in the supply chain. That starts when your trucks or containers make their way to us, where offloading is done safely and methodically using carts, forklifts, and other tools designed to manage the weight.
From there, we move goods and store them on racking or pallets specifically chosen to handle the size and weight of larger goods. This minimizes the risk of damage during storage and when our team comes to pick goods to fill an order. From there, we move things to packing stations instead of using automated tools because heavy products can wear down many conveyors — damaging the equipment and putting the product at risk. So you can be sure everything is protected well before the final appliance delivery process begins.
The core aspects of moving heavy products align with how we care for every item in our inventory: slow and steady with careful precision. Our experts can meet SLA requirements to get all of your orders ready and shipped on time, but we do it without rushing so that your goods are safe and secure.
4. What happens when something goes wrong?
Mistakes happen in warehouses, and any truthful 3PL or partner will admit that. The most important thing about a mistake is what happens right afterward. Does your partner fess up and discuss it, or do they hide the issue and hope you (or your customer) won’t notice.
Red Stag takes any shrinkage extremely seriously. We have a zero-shrinkage guarantee that means there’s no margin for loss on your part. So, if a product is damaged while under our control, we pay the wholesale price of it. That’s a core part of our promise and guarantee to every partner.
What happens when damage occurs outside of our control, such as during inbound transit or last-mile delivery? Our mission is to help you recover from the carrier or company that was in control.
5. How do you keep your team safe during appliance delivery?
Training and proper equipment are the best ways to keep teams safe. That’s how we protect our Herd during every step of the fulfillment process. Ongoing safety efforts, ensuring there is enough space for people and products on aisles, one-way traffic, lights and sounds on forklifts, and more all ensure our teams operate safely and securely.
We also know that we’re not the only experts when it comes to safety. So, you’ll see us reach out to others to learn about best practices, especially during peak season where safety is paramount.
Because products have different requirements and characteristics, we recommend you contact us to learn more about how we protect people and specific goods.
The final touch: Can I see your warehouse space for inbound and appliance delivery?
As you build out your 3PL RFP template or continue conversations with prospects, you’ll want to dig into specifics. One of the best ways to verify what you’re told and ensure things meet your specifications is to see the facilities of partners that make your shortlist.
A 3PL should be willing to show you their facilities and give you a tour of operations in action. That lets you see their process, equipment, and training. Plus, you’re likely to see how many carriers come to their site and how much volume they can handle. You’ll get a feel for if there is room for you to grow and send them more inventory.
Go and meet them. See how they treat products and their people. Ask questions and look for products about the same size and weight as yours.
