The Amware Fulfillment & Logistics Blog

When you partner with a fulfillment company, a great deal of work moves from your plate to their plate. But you’re footing the bill for those services and, therefore, should understand pick and pack fulfillment costs in order to assess the ROI of that relationship.

That said, pick and pack pricing can be a bit of a black box. In this article, we'll take a peek inside the box. We’ll examine the make-up of pick and pack fees

In today's fiercely competitive e-commerce landscape, where super-efficient fulfillment is critical, the pricing for order fulfillment services remains a puzzle. For e-retailers, understanding pricing basics is vital, especially since 60% of online retailers at least partially outsource fulfillment. But be wary of providers who promise to make it easy with instant quotes based on limited data. 

For fast-growing nutrition brand, Four Sigmatic, Amware helped reduce pick and pack costs 15%, reduce parcel shipping costs 4%, and sustain 99.9% order accuracy through a period of rapid growth.

Matthew Hertz, Founder of Second Marathon Consulting, is a leading matchmaker between eRetailers and order fulfillment services providers. He recently chatted with Amware’s EVP of Strategy & Operations, Chad Warzecha, for an episode of Unboxing Fulfillment– the modern B2C fulfillment podcast.

B2C order fulfillment often involves more than basic pick and pack operations. There are a variety of additional considerations for presenting your brand to your customers in the best possible light and for optimizing processes to reduce costs. One of the more important considerations is the implementation of fulfillment kitting services.

As someone who oversees order fulfillment services, your focus tends to be on accurate, on-time delivery and controlling parcel shipping costs, which can be up to 70% of total fulfillment costs. There isn’t a big interest in box sizes, bubble wrap, and other packaging-related details.

But that’s a mistake.

In 1903 when Henry Ford introduced the Model A, he was convinced his invention would replace the horse and buggy in no time. But horses and buggies continued to outsell his cars until he developed the assembly line process to mass produce his Model T, making automobiles affordable to the average family.

Robots are amazing. They’re what ecommerce fulfillment needs right now to solve the chronic labor shortage in warehouses and

Today we have rovers mining Mars, robots assisting heart surgery and AI writing poetry. But can and will automation technology be there for you when you really need it during a spike of online purchases or a period of order volatility?

Industry buzzwords come and go, but one phrase that has stuck – and is pushing shippers to rethink their fulfillment strategies – is “omnichannel.” And while the term may have made Gartner’s list of overused marketing words as far back as 2014, omnichannel is holding its own in a world where customers expect to have a seamless experience across all sales channels through omnichannel fulfillment services.

Warehouse kitting is the process of taking multiple SKUs and combining them to create one new SKU. To keep labor costs in check, it's important to get the kitting process right. Are your – or your 3PL’s – kitting operations as efficient as they could be?