Pack and Ship Services
Friday, May 21st, 2010As you can tell from the name, a pack and ship service handles the packing and shipping of merchandise. They typically concentrate on providing services to small businesses who are either unable or merely don’t want the hassle of shipping for themselves. They provide an excellent alternative to developing and maintaining an in-house mail room.
Pack and Ship vs. Fulfillment Services
Pack and ship services typically do not store inventory, but concentrate on shipping services. Invoices, billing and all customer contacts continue to be done by the retailer. These services can be especially worthwhile to those who need to ship hard to package items or items that need special shipping or insurance.
Most pack and ship operations use several carriers – DHL, USPS, FedEx, UPS and others. Some will also arrange local transport and may provide custom drop-offs at airports. Many will pick up items as well as send them, so you could use them as virtual addresses.
Fulfillment services often handle storage as well as shipping. They may even pick and pack thereby fulfilling all your shipping and storage needs. The biggest difference between a fulfillment service and a pack and ship service is that a fulfillment service will usually offer to store merchandise for you. Fulfillment services typically charge for processing orders as well as packing and shipping fees.
Pick-up is an option rendered by pack and ship companies, but for any large volume, a fulfillment service might be the better option – because they are willing to store stock for you.
Specialty Services
Some pack and ship services will specialize in external shipping. Their familiarity with insurance, custom regulations and costs for shipping overseas can be priceless. Additionally many offer:
• Assured delivery – same day, overnight and next-day.
• No size limitations and custom crating for delicate or unique items.
• Cargo insurance – important for time-sensitive deliveries, perishables and foreign country shipping.
• Package tracking
• Office add-ons on site: copies, supplies, fax, mail boxes and even notary services.
A few small pack and ship services will hold items in hand (if you rent a mailbox) and ship them at your direction. However, they are usually not set up for large-scale storage and only small item sellers would find this practical.
Fulfillment services usually offer a specialty service that pack and ship operations don’t: customer contact in the form of receipts mailed to your customers, tracking information and in the case of some fulfillment companies, billing services. This is very convenient when the only customer contact required is a courtesy follow up email.
Deciding between pack and ship and fulfillment services
Pack and ship services might be the better choice when you only need to send a few items or if you need to send very few expensive items. They also offer the additional benefit of being able to accept, as well as send, packages. They usually have many more shipping options than straight fulfillment services. This becomes very important if you want to send valuable or fragile merchandise, when the loss of even a single item might adversely affect your bottom line. If this is the case, insurance and package tracking are more important than the need to store large amounts of inventory.
Pack and ship services allow you more control over the order. Because you begin the process you can decide when the item will be shipped. If the item has a longer distance to travel before it reaches the hands of the customer, a pack and ship company would also be more likely to ensure a timely arrival.
Jeff Ehrlich is the head of FulfillmentPlusNY which delivers <A href=”http://www.fulfillmentplusny.com”>fulfillment services</a> for a litney of customers~clients~accounts~companies~businesses} globally.Contact Jeff for <A href=”http://www.fulfillmentplusny.com/direct-to-consumer/order-processing.cfm”>order processing</a> services.
