E-commerce Purchases are Rocketing

It’s been trending for a while actually, but the global pandemic and associated ‘stay at home’ orders, plus restrictions on business operations and occupancy of brick-and-mortar establishments has accelerated it beyond even the most hardened analyst expectations – says Tony Dobson, SnapFulfil CEO for UK & Europe. “As much as e-commerce is a commercial opportunity for once traditional retail B2B businesses, they also face acute growing pains as they struggle to meet warehouse and fulfilment demands. That’s where third party logistics (3PL) companies have an opportunity to seize the day.

“For 3PLs they are also having to adapt their operations and models to meet the ‘new world’ customer requirements that are often difficult to systematically accommodate, such as gift experience, low-mix/high volume, size, weight and packaging requirements, high mix/low volume, increased service and delivery levels, to name but a few. This makes it hard to perform efficiently while also maintaining the proper inventory visibility and accuracy needed.

“Most challenging though is having to qualify internal limitations or present an unattractive price in order to cover the transactional cost to the 3PL. SnapFulfil has been working increasingly with 3PL partners to provide a scalable, easily configured, API friendly and robust pathway to meet the demands of B2C multichannel fulfilment operations. Advanced cloud-based WMS offers best-of-breed billing software, flexible and easy specific workflows and processes to meet individual customer needs, multiple picking/packing approaches to ensure the application can support efficient approaches in structuring and prioritising work, plus an information-rich portal offering enhanced visibility.

“This all combines to provide a very fitting answer to a very complex question: How do I gain the ability to satisfy a variety of customers with differing requirements, without incurring custom coding costs and delays for every new client? We bring a base-feature set tailored to your challenges that is highly configurable – even by your own team, after training – to support everything from new customer onboarding to changes they may need in their processes. We’ve also standardised our interfaces to support easily understood and accomplished integrations and come to the table with a library of existing applications to help ease your technical sales processes.”