For many eCommerce companies, figuring out how to ship furniture safely and affordably is their biggest supply chain challenge. Done wrong, and it can grind profits down to nothing. Done right and fulfillment can become a competitive advantage that protects margins and gets you more 5-star reviews.
Shipping furniture comes with a unique set of challenges. Your products tend to be bulky and heavy, even when you use flat-pack designs. Assembled pieces present an even bigger test. At Red Stag Fulfillment, we have significant experience with eCommerce fulfillment for today’s in-demand furniture.
Let’s look at how you can optimize the DTC furniture trend with the right fulfillment partner.
Warehouses designed with furniture in mind
Furniture isn’t quite like anything else in today’s eCommerce world. Some of your flat-pack items move in dense, heavy boxes that take a team to move. Others are bulky but lightweight and always need DIM weight pricing checked. When you ship furniture, every SKU has its own planning, required protections, and specific instructions.
A 3PL that doesn’t focus on furniture like yours won’t be able to handle those nuances. That’s true whether you launch new products via Kickstarter and need the ability to scale fulfillment immediately, or you’re an established company with products and colors that already have a lot of fans. You deserve a partner specializing in large parcels to avoid damage, delays, and other fulfillment issues.
Red Stag Fulfillment is designed to help products like yours. Here are some benefits you can expect when you ship furniture with us.
Scale with room for every SKU
One of the first things you learn when you ship furniture is that products tend to be large and bulky. Space can become an issue when you keep enough inventory in stock to meet your sales potential. Running your own warehouse can mean cramming things into every available inch, sometimes at the risk of an item’s integrity.
Space constraints shouldn’t force you into unsafe stacking or overloading pallets that put people and products at risk.
Red Stag Fulfillment has enough room today to give your SKUs space to stretch their legs. We currently have more than 1 million sq. ft. of space, plus an additional 157,000 sq. ft. coming online by the end of September. We expect a new 4.5 million sq. ft. campus to come online in Sweetwater, TN, in 2022.
For you, that means there’s space for your inventory right now and when you scale. There’s room for accessories like pillows and extra arms to full chairs, tables, couches, and more. Space doesn’t have to be a constraint to your sales or create risks to your products.
Plus, you only pay for space you need, never empty pallets or air.
Target unnecessary fees
Part of our focus on being the best to ship furniture means we’ve learned the industry inside and out, including fees and surcharges you can face. Our mission is to help you eliminate those on every order.
Red Stag’s experts start by looking at goods and existing packaging. There may be opportunities to help control costs or reduce fees, often unique to shipping large items. For example, removing the plastic banding that some manufacturers use can eliminate a typical surcharge to ship furniture.
For many partners, including furniture brands, additional fulfillment and shipping fees or surcharges can be applied to most orders. Our order volume also enables us to negotiate discounts with carriers specifically for large, heavy, and bulky goods like furniture. We pass those discounts on to you. Combined with our shipping rate discounts and same-day fulfillment guarantees, Red Stag’s extensive fulfillment network saves you money while increasing customer satisfaction with quick delivery.
Eliminate shrinkage, regardless of size
We excel in working with furniture and have yet to meet something too big to work with or ship. Unlike many other 3PLs, we know that it’s possible to store items like yours safely. That’s because we have the right teams, training, and equipment to reduce the risk of damage.
As soon as we receive your inventory and add it to your available stock, we hold ourselves accountable for it. So, Red Stag’s no-shrinkage guarantee applies to all the furniture we ship. If your products are damaged or go missing while in our control after the receiving process, we make you whole by paying the wholesale cost.
That covers every SKU we handle. It’s our commitment to helping you keep customers happy and revenue flowing. Contact us to learn more about how this and our other guarantees apply to our efforts to ship furniture and more.
Ensure returns don’t mean losses
Every eCommerce business faces returns, but these can be deadly to the revenue of standard and flat-pack furniture brands. So, our goal is to work with you to mitigate concerns around returns whenever possible. Not only do our warehouse professionals handle returns for companies like yours, but we offer special support.
When a customer returns a product due to damage, it’s often discovered during their assembly of it. Our experts can check for that specific type of action or damage. You may choose not to resell any goods that were partially assembled and then disassembled. In that case, our team can review returns for this customer action or identify elements that may be in a pristine state and available for use as parts.
Instead of having a total loss on a return, it may be possible to sell these replacement parts and recoup some of the cost of the original item.
Our facilities that house your SKUs also process your returns. That makes these efforts possible and avoids some added costs. These services always are tailored to individual company needs and requirements. Please tell us yours, and we’ll create a path forward.
Outsource to make sales easier
Red Stag is your expert to ship furniture across the U.S. We specialize in goods like yours and tailor processes and packaging for each SKU. That means the fulfillment process can go from headache to competitive advantage while potentially reducing your current costs too. You get back to selling while we prioritize fulfillment.
Discover the potential savings and improved fulfillment speed available to you by contacting us today.
