How To Structure Your Multi-Channel Fulfillment Strategy

Having multiple sales channels can diversify and boost your business’s revenue, all while lessening its risk. Adding channels, however, also increases your fulfillment needs.

To tackle this issue, we’ll discuss how to align your fulfillment strategy with your multi-channel selling approach.

Why You Need a Multi-Channel Selling Strategy

First, let’s talk about the business advantages of selling on multiple channels.

Broader Reach

Due to the rapid growth of eCommerce over the past few years, consumers now have a wide array of choices when they shop. And, thanks to numerous online channels, the simplicity of researching and comparing products has increased the average number of pre-sale touchpoints to eight or more depending on your niche.

With multi-channel fulfillment, you can reach current and potential customers across various touchpoints. You’ll be where they are, when they need your product(s), increasing your chances of acquiring new buyers and closing more sales.

Improved Customer Retention

Statistics from Cybra indicate businesses that engage customers on multiple channels retain 89% of them on average. Meanwhile, companies with limited sales channels keep only 33% of their customers.

This is because a multi-channel approach provides a better customer experience. For instance, customers move across devices and platforms to find and purchase what they want. In fact, 64% use different devices to start and complete a purchase. If they’re unable to find what they want, like their desired price and shipping speed, 59% then head to Amazon. So, brands have to be agile to accommodate this jumpy behavior.

Additionally, customers want the best deals and a more personalized experience. With more sales channels, you can provide a tailored shopping journey by:

• Enabling customers to find you using any device
• Offering buyers more payment and shipping options
• Exploiting sales and promos on different shopping platforms, which allows customers to find the best deals

Engage Mobile Shoppers

We mentioned how online shoppers shift between gadgets, but many of their purchases actually take place on mobile devices.

In Q4 of 2019, mobile commerce accounted for 51% of North America’s total online transactions. Even while shopping in physical stores, before making a decision, 82% of customers checked out products on their smartphones.

Engaging those mobile shoppers will expand your reach and help increase your sales.  But that doesn’t mean you have to create a mobile shopping app for your company. You can simply make your products available to customers on platforms like Amazon or Shopify, which have their own apps you can leverage.

Decreased Risk

Imagine you have three sales channels. After a while, you discover two are doing well and one is performing poorly. This isn’t a major issue, as your two thriving channels can cover the losses of the third. However, if you relied on a single sales channel, the damage would be more severe.

Creating a network of sales channels allows you to offset — or even eliminate — a point of failure. But each channel has its strengths and weaknesses, so you have to monitor them carefully to stay afloat.

The Bottom Line for Your Bottom Line

All these benefits can lead to increased revenue. To give you a concrete figure, Shopify reported that businesses with multiple sales channels generate 190% more revenue than those using only one. So, if you don’t have a multi-channel approach in place, now’s the time to adopt one — before you miss out on any more opportunities.

How To Align Fulfillment and Multi-Channel Selling Strategies

As previously mentioned, having more sales channels necessitates additional fulfillment. With more places to buy, your business has to accept and complete a greater number of orders on multiple platforms, which can quickly become overwhelming. Here are some ways to align your fulfillment logistics to multi-channel selling:

Spread Out Your Risk

Having multiple sales channels decreases your risk. This sentiment applies to your fulfillment as well: Don’t put all your eggs in one basket and rely on a single provider; if they run into issues, your entire business could grind to a halt.

A healthy mix of fulfillment solutions that can accommodate your channels is ideal, plus you can distribute fulfillment duties among various providers depending on your goods, for example:

• FBA for fast-moving Amazon items
• MyFBAPrep for FBA prep and fulfillment for other channels
• Your own in-house fulfillment for slow-moving items

Ensure Cohesive Branding

Packaging is your brand’s first physical representation. It gives you the opportunity to maximize your initial impression on customers. In the long term, your custom packaging is what makes your brand recognizable. You can differentiate it by

• Incorporating a unique aesthetic
• Employing a design that makes opening your packaging an experience
• Using special materials (such as eco-friendly packaging)

Your first priority, however, is to ensure your packaging provides a cohesive and uniform brand experience across your sales channels. This makes your brand easily identifiable so customers will remember you when it’s time for them to buy again.

To achieve this, work with reliable partners that can accommodate your branding’s packaging requirements (e.g., specific dimensions, materials, aesthetic, or design) wherever you sell. You can consider Arka, the leading company that creates custom packages for any niche: whether you need custom soap boxes or custom folding cartons, they can help you!

Digital Integration

Having a digitally connected supply chain makes managing fulfillment across your sales channels simpler. With it, you can:

• Optimize your distribution and delivery networks
• Automate some of your manual processes and streamline inefficient ones
• Easily monitor your supply chain with end-to-end visibility and traceability

You’ll also have access to an abundance of useful data, which carries over to our next point.

Look at Your Data

The information your smart supply chain provides will guide you to make data-driven fulfillment decisions and develop new strategies. Ask yourself the following questions:

• What are my fastest-moving sales channels?
• Where are my consumers focused?

Once you have your answers, you can craft efficient fulfillment processes based on your historic sales and projected velocity.

Stay Flexible

Things could change at any moment, forcing you to adapt or collapse. Stay flexible by keeping all of your processes well documented. This will give you a playbook to follow should similar problems arise in the future. Here are a few considerations to keep in mind:

• Do you have an ERP?
• Should you go headless?

Wrapping up

Having a multi-channel sales approach yields many benefits for your business, but requires robust logistics. With an efficient supply chain, you can accommodate more sales channels without choking your fulfillment processes.

It’s important to align and adjust your fulfillment strategies with all your channels to maintain a seamless flow between the two and thus protect your business operations.

If you are looking for a fulfillment and logistics partner who understands the complexities of Amazon FBA and FBA prep, reach out to MyFBAPrep today.

About the Author

Rachel Go is the marketing director of MyFBAPrep, a nationwide and international network of 3PLs and prep centers, with 50+ warehouses, 5 million+ square feet of operating space, and the ability to reach any US customer (or FBA center) in 1 - 2 days. MyFBAPrep provides access to strategic warehouse locations and a wide variety of eCommerce services with a single partnership, along with white glove customer service and best-in-class technology. Sellers can send items into a single MyFBAPrep location and let us handle shipment splitting, prepping, packaging, and shipping across their sales channels.

Our customers choose us because we provide redundancy and access to strategic locations via a single partnership. We offer best-in-class customer service and technology.

Our warehouses work with us because we allow them to focus on what they do best: send large quantities of inventory to Amazon quickly and flawlessly. We eliminate the need for multiple communication platforms and provide the best warehouse platform for FBA prep available today.