Is your current North American fulfillment solution able to reach your customers quickly and affordably? Do you have the expertise and capabilities you need, or are today’s practices doing more harm than good?
One of the core reasons companies approach Red Stag Fulfillment is they struggle to keep fulfillment affordable. Add in a growing number of returns, more product imports, and customers expanding across the continent, and controlling costs get even more challenging. So, let’s look at the five biggest eCommerce concerns for North American fulfillment solutions and services, what you can do about it, and how we help every day.
Shipping costs scale alongside customers
In eCommerce, your next customer is just as likely to be 10 miles or 1,000 miles away from the last. That doesn’t matter to your customers or website, but it matters a lot for your shipping costs. As you grow and sales diversify, so do customers. This means you’ve got a more complex fulfillment need and can see significant spikes in your average order cost.
Unfortunately, most growing eCommerce companies aren’t large enough to negotiate discounts for their North American fulfillment, especially as you bring multiple countries into the mix. Increased imports and exports introduce more complexity and require you to hire more experts. That can be tough, especially if average order values are stable.
Don’t you deserve a better deal on North American fulfillment?
How Red Stag Fulfillment supports scale
Reducing shipping costs is one of the best ways for an eCommerce store to protect its bottom line. This is especially important for small and growing operations that can see a spike in many costs as products, customer locations, and order sizes diversify.
We designed Red Stag Fulfillment to help you control those costs. By negotiating with carriers, we lower your overall shipping costs on every order. Offering multiple distribution locations reduces how far your orders travel, further reducing their costs. And by partnering with freight forwarders, we can even help you improve the timing and lower the costs of your imports.
Partnering with us can reduce your costs per order, allowing you to stretch today’s dollars further as you aim to meet more customer demands across North America.
Read 7 additional ways to reduce your shipping costs
Orders are wrong and people are upset
The fastest delivery in the world isn’t much use when the contents are wrong. Incorrect orders cause significant harm and risk to any North American fulfillment solution. Sending the wrong package out the door consistently correlates with:
- Reduced profit margins
- Lower conversion rates and repeat shopping rates
- Higher shipping costs (returns and replacements)
- Lower customer satisfaction
- Poorer reviews
And each of these issues starts with your warehouse. The layout and shelving, staff being in a hurry, a lack of checks, and manual processes all drive lower order accuracy. None of that helps your business or the customer, but it can feel impossible to change if you’re growing rapidly. Your business needs order accuracy protection.
How Red Stag Fulfillment improves accuracy
People want what they order and are upset when the wrong thing arrives. The reason for the mistake doesn’t matter. So, to help you keep customers happy, we reduce error rates substantially. And RSF pays you each time we get something wrong.
Today, the typical fulfillment company mis-picks and sends 2% of all orders out incorrectly. For your company, that could mean multiple orders per day are packaged and sent incorrectly. By introducing multiple checks into our processes, Red Stag Fulfillment has an error rate of less than 0.02%. That means we get just 1 out of more than 5,000 orders wrong.
There’s no secret trick or magic to it. We care about our work and make it easy for our warehouse teams to verify order accuracy multiple times before an order goes out the door.
Discover our order accuracy guarantee
Returns are eating profit margins
Unfortunately, eCommerce businesses face a significant number of returns, even when the customer gets exactly what they ordered. Many shoppers now buy multiple products online with the plan of sending at least one thing back. It’s the new state of eCommerce and significantly impacts all North American fulfillment solution conversations.
Instead of banning returns, your business can embrace returns and use them to drive profitability. That may seem surprising, but having a robust returns policy is linked to increased spending over time, better reviews, and happier customers. The risk is that you need to control the cost of returns, especially when it comes to keeping shipping expenses down and using returned inventory.
If you don’t have a plan, then you could be forgetting about returned goods on a shelf, restocking inventory unnecessarily, and paying a premium rate for freight and orders going back and forth.
How Red Stag Fulfillment handles returns
To protect your operations, you need a plan for returns, especially during busy times like the year-end holidays. RSF helps you plan by offering robust returns processing that includes checks and verification. Plus, you get automatic inventory updates when a return is added to any location.
Every return is reviewed based on your standards, and we only restock what you would be happy to sell again. That minimizes the time goods are out of circulation and helps control your costs by getting products ready for that next order.
And don’t worry, we don’t upcharge or add “premium” fees for the holidays or your busy seasons. You get the same excellent service at the same great price, whether it’s Black Friday or just another Tuesday.
See our 6-step process for every return
You need to hire outside of your expertise
Few eCommerce companies start because the entrepreneur really wants to negotiate with carriers and ship boxes to customers. However, that’s a core part of getting your eCommerce functionality right. The warehouse is often just as important as the digital storefront for long-term viability. But, if you didn’t start out aiming to become a warehouse expert, how do you hire the right one to manage in-house operations?
It only gets more difficult as you learn more digital systems, introduce new ad units, keep up with social changes, and much more. At least many of those areas are built on the same tech or people skills. But, when orders pile up, it can be harmful to your business to pull those leaders away from regular tasks to start filling boxes. You need expertise that makes it possible to scale without impacting other operations.
How Red Stag Fulfillment offers expertise
We take expertise a step further than just hiring the best warehouse and logistics professionals in the business.
Red Stag Fulfillment has the experts you need to support every part of the supply chain. Our freight forward partnerships make it easy to import goods to North America. In-house experts ensure shipments meet U.S. and other regulations as they move across the continent and make it to customers safely and on time. With a single, smart dashboard, you can monitor all aspects of your inventory and establish an unbroken chain of custody, keeping the documents you need for your operations.
We’ll even help you figure out the best inventory levels to maintain, where to position your products, and how to forecast those year-end sales. Our North American fulfillment solution experts are yours, and they’re here to help.
Old tech makes it hard to help customers
One of the most common help desk questions an eCommerce business gets is: “Where is my order?”
When it takes agents a long time to answer — or worse, someone must email and wait days for a reply — your customers can get frustrated. That’ll increase the likelihood of a return or refund request or someone deciding you’re a scam and disputing the charge.
Instead, you should be able to integrate North American fulfillment solutions with your help teams and eCommerce tools. That’ll automate the delivery of tracking details and order updates without you needing to lift a finger. A simple dashboard helps agents immediately see the status of any order.
But how do you make that all happen?
How Red Stag Fulfillment improves tech stacks
The last thing you should worry about is your tech breaking down, especially when you’re just trying to offer a better service. RSF is designed to support your business no matter how you sell by integrating with leading eCommerce tools and services, such as Shopify, WooCommerce, BigCommerce, eBay, OpenCart, and more.
And if you’re selling on social, we support these tools’ social integrations to make the fulfillment of Instagram and Facebook orders seamless.
No matter where in North America your customers are or how they find you online, our integration experts help make your sales smooth and easy. That’s multinational, multichannel support from the first day you onboard with us.
Plus, you get access to multiple fulfillment locations for every channel, helping you keep shipping costs down even as you integrate and sell more.
Check out our integration partners and services
What’s your biggest worry?
Your business’ struggles are unique, and that means you could be facing a much more specific problem. At Red Stag Fulfillment, our ethos is to elevate expectations by pursuing perfection. So, we make experts available to help companies like you solve their problems and grow their business. That’s true if you need regional help or true North American fulfillment that crosses borders.
If you’re struggling with fulfillment and customer satisfaction or don’t know how to get where you need to be, it’s time to ask yourself one question. What’s your biggest North American fulfillment solution worry, and are you ready for help?
