Parcel Zone Skipping Changes the Last Mile Delivery Landscape

Jul 1, 2022 | Blog

One of the important lessons learned from the recent supply chain upheaval has been that the old ways of logistics just aren’t sustainable. Everything from inventory management to customer experience is being looked at with a fresh set of eyes, looking for solutions that can keep deliveries flowing while giving customers a reason to come back for more. 

A key point of frustration for eCommerce brands has been the heavy price of cross-country shipping. With products sent to customers all over the world, packages make multiple stops at different warehouses and distribution centers, all with their own rates and processing fees. As the item approaches its final destination, these expenses start to stack up, potentially driving away sales to competitors with cheaper shipping rates. 

Rising shipping costs show no signs of slowing down, and eCommerce brands eagerly seek out new ways of getting their products from point A to point B in a way that’s reliable and cost-effective. With all the pressure to find alternate delivery methods, some brands have adopted parcel zone skipping as a way to reduce the cost of last mile shipping. 

What are Delivery Zones?

Delivery zones are the geographic areas a carrier ships packages. Typically, the more zones a package passes through, the higher its shipping cost. 

While the general structure of shipping zones is similar across carriers, they aren’t the same for every delivery. A package’s origin is designated as Zone 1, with the zone numbers increasing as the delivery destination gets further away. For example, if you shipped an item from San Francisco to St. Louis, San Francisco would be considered Zone 1, and St. Louis would be considered Zone 7.

This is why online brands can provide benefits like free shipping to customers in their warehouse’s immediate area. Without the need to pass through any outside distribution centers, shipping costs can remain low. When sending parcels across the country, however, delivery zones can become a hurdle when trying to keep up with customer expectations and competitor prices. That’s why so many brands are looking into zone skipping as a more affordable fulfillment strategy. 

What is Zone Skipping? 

Rather than shipping individual parcels, zone skipping involves consolidating your many ready-to-mail packages into a single truckload, then sending the shipment to a specific zone as one. From there, the individual items can be distributed to customers at a closer proximity, with the shipping cost reflecting only one delivery zone. 

If you’re sending products from California to customers in New York, you can send the items directly to the New York area. Customers then pay for shipping in a single zone, instead of paying for a cross-country shipment. 

By sending an entire shipment or orders to a single zone, you avoid the financial burden of multi-zone shipping. For brands struggling to keep up with the low-cost shipping options offered by competitors like Amazon, zone skipping presents a distribution method that can provide an avenue for a lower cost of shipping.  

Not only does this lower the price for your customer, but the closer your items are to their doorstep, the quicker they’ll be able to arrive. Since the order is already in the customer’s delivery zone, they can expect the parcel to arrive in a matter of days. 

When to Consider Zone Skipping

While zone skipping is a great way to get products to customers quicker and for a smaller price, it might not be an ideal solution for every eCommerce brand. Let’s take a look at when online retailers should consider zone skipping as a feasible fulfillment strategy. 

Cross Country Shipments

If you’re regularly sending orders to customers on the other side of the continent, zone skipping offers clear opportunities to help your brand excel. However, if your primary customer base exists locally, or is just a zone or two away, sending orders to that delivery zone might not be worth the investment. 

To determine if zone skipping is the right choice for your brand, you’ll need to calculate the cost of shipping grouped packages combined with the expense of delivering each product to its destination. If that amount is less than sending each item individually, then zone skipping might be worth looking into more.

Large Order & Product Volume

For zone skipping to make financial sense, you’ll need to ship enough products to fill an entire container. If you haven’t built a substantial enough customer base in the zone you’re shipping to, you might be paying to move products that will just sit on a shelf. 

However, if your order volume isn’t high enough to justify a full semi-trailer, carriers might be able to accommodate a pairing of your shipment with another brand. By consolidating the two shipments, the container can be filled enough to make the trip cost effective. This service might not be available with every carrier, so it’s important to check whether zone skipping is possible with your specific shipping partner. 

Product Tracking Capabilities 

One of the major disadvantages of zone skipping is that it makes tracking packages a little more complicated. Since you’re sending items to another location before their final distribution, your carrier might not be able to provide the most accurate information about when the delivery is likely to be completed. 

That’s why it’s important to have quality reporting and visibility tools in place before you opt for zone skipping. That way, you and your customers will never be left in the dark when it comes to where products are on their delivery journey. 

Conclusion 

Parcel zone skipping keeps the cost of shipping low while cutting down on delivery time. This dual advantage has made it one of the more popular fulfillment strategies as brands continue to grapple with supply chain challenges. 

If your online store has a cross-country customer base with a high order volume, parcel zone skipping might be the shipping solution you’re looking for. 

If you’re looking for a fulfillment partner to help optimize your delivery process, contact the Fulfillment Experts at ShipHero today.

Alternative Delivery Methods to Overcome Inventory Shortages During Peak

Apr 8, 2022 | Blog

As the logistics world gears up for another peak season, brands are looking back on last year’s shortfalls to determine where there’s room for improvement, or experimentation, with how products are shipped. 

While the supply chain remains strained by the rapid growth of online orders, new methods and technologies have emerged that help simplify the complicated world of fulfillment and shipping. 

According to GoShippo.com, 56% of retailers identified the cost of shipping as their number one challenge. As inventory shortages and delays persist, keeping these costs under control could give your brand the upper hand against competitors. Let’s take a look at some of the benefits of alternative shipping options and fulfillment technologies to see how they can keep you ahead of the curve this upcoming peak season. 

Micro Fulfillment Centers

From the onset of COVID-19, inventory shortages and warehouse bottlenecks have become a major burden for eCommerce brands. Without the ability to get products to their customers in a timely manner, retailers face the possibility of falling behind on sales and missing an opportunity to scale.

The rapid expansion of online shopping has led to online retailers renting out additional fulfillment centers to accommodate the growing number of orders. 

In an effort to shorten delivery times, or eliminate them entirely, many brands have turned to converting existing warehouse space in closer proximity to their customers. These micro fulfillment centers, or MFCs, are typically located in urban centers and provide more flexible delivery options. Brick and mortar store fronts with extra room in the back have become extremely valuable for brands seeking to cut down on last-mile logistics. 

In addition to quicker delivery, MFCs also facilitate the option of in-store pick ups, giving nearby customers the ability to bypass the delivery process entirely. Not only does this provide a more satisfying customer experience, but also works to cut down on the workload of your warehouse and carrier operations. 

Utilizing New Warehouse Technology

While partnering with reliable and innovative carriers is important for efficient shipping, those deliveries are only as dependable as the warehouses they’re shipped from. It might be tempting to invest in new integrations to get your small business shipping back on track. But the best supply chain solutions might come from focusing on the factors you can directly control inside your fulfillment center. 

Robotics

One of the most common barriers to scale for eCommerce brands is the price of labor, and those costs continue to increase as online shopping becomes the norm. For a sustainable fulfillment operation that can handle a growing pool of customers, many brands have invested in warehouse robotics. 

With this new technology automating some of the more time consuming aspects of fulfillment, your existing warehouse staff gets increased capacity to focus on the timeliness and accuracy of orders. 

While robotics might come with a high upfront cost, avoiding shipping errors and inventory shortages commonly brought on by manual fulfillment processes can be valuable for long-term and sustainable growth. 

Outsourced Fulfillment Service Providers

For an alternative supply chain solution, a top-tier fulfillment service provider might be the answer. With inventory shortages slowing down deliveries, a proper shipping 3PL can help your brand stay ahead of those issues before they impact consumers. 

In addition to a smoother buying experience, the secure estimates of inventory and delivery times that a high-visibility fulfillment provider can provide highlights where your fulfillment operation is falling short. This added awareness is essential to building an optimized delivery process that can handle an influx of orders during peak shipping season. 

Inventory Management Strategies

Inventory shortages have become an unfortunate reality for eCommerce brands in recent years. No matter the size of your company, what products you offer or how many customers you work with, peak season can quickly put a strain on your fulfillment operations. 

Let’s take a look at some of the strategies brands have adopted to stay on top of their inventory levels and work around shortages before they can spoil the customer’s buying experience.

Avoiding Overselling 

Inventory shortages can mean big trouble for emerging eCommerce brands. This common issue limits the amount of sales you’re able to make. It can also turn away potential customers due to lack of supply, and they might be less inclined to return to your store in the future.

Peak season, although it may be challenging, offers an opportunity to build greater trust between you and your customers. By prioritizing visibility in your warehouse, you’ll be able to flag out-of-stock items on your site, or alert customers when inventories are low before they begin the purchasing process. 

Allowing Room for Scale

Opening up your brand to multiple channels lays a solid foundation for scalability. By integrating with multiple eCommerce channels, such as Amazon, Shopify, Etsy and others, you increase your capacity for an expanding customer base while providing those customers with the ability to make purchases using the platforms they prefer. 

In addition to opening up these new sales channels, prioritizing automation in your fulfillment processes can allow your brand to scale while curbing inventory issues before they arise. Outdated workflows like offline spreadsheets, unintegrated tools and manual tracking just can’t provide the efficiency and flexibility that’s required for a modernized supply chain. 

Prioritize Visibility 

Once you’ve opened your brand to new sales channels and optimized your warehouse, it’s essential to keep tabs on all facets of your business to identify potential shortfalls in delivery and inventory management. 

A major visibility issue brands run into has to do with integrations. If you’re working with multiple data and carrier platforms, a lack of alignment between these tools can make it difficult to understand true inventory levels, leading to confusion for both you and your customers. 

Conclusion

Inventory shortages and congested supply chains might be the new norm for eCommerce brands, but that doesn’t mean those problems can’t be solved. With the emergence of alternative delivery methods like micro fulfillment centers and new warehouse optimization tools, your brand is faced with an opportunity to rethink how deliveries are made and be better prepared when peak season rolls around again. 

If you’re looking for a partner to help your eCommerce scale to new heights, contact the Fulfillment Experts at ShipHero today.

Click HERE to Schedule a Meeting Today

3 eCommerce Tools to Implement Now for a Successful Q4

Apr 22, 2022 | Blog

In order to stay competitive in today’s supply chain environment, brands need to constantly innovate and reevaluate their fulfillment tools to decide whether they have what it takes for a successful Q4.

With the online shopping’s busiest season quickly approaching, now is the time to take a look at your brand’s fulfillment strategy and decide where there’s room for improvement. By investing in warehouse automation solutions, flexible storage strategies and data warehouse tools, competitors are working hard to ensure this peak season runs a little smoother than the rest.

Here’s a look at three essential tools to help boost your eCommerce brand in preparation for Q4. 

Automation in the Warehouse 

Warehouse robotics might sound like a heavy investment, but even small-scale automation tools can increase the efficiency and accuracy of your fulfillment center. 

In recent years, more fulfillment centers have begun to install cost-effective warehouse robotics like sorting and bagging equipment, automated label printing and wearable technology that boosts the productivity of a warehouse.

One of the most common and accessible types of warehouse automation is known as collaborative robots. The process of identifying an order, walking to its storage location, picking it from the shelf and returning it to the packing station takes up considerable time. As the name implies, collaborative robots work alongside your existing staff to handle some of these repetitive and time consuming tasks. Since they’re customizable to fit your fulfillment center’s specific needs, these machines are designed to scale as your eCommerce brand continues to grow. 

According to Automate.org, the use of collaborative robots is expected to rapidly expand as fulfillment centers seek out better ways to lower labor costs while finding a flexible automation solution. If the layout of your warehouse changes, or you need to switch locations, collaborative robots can change right along with it. 

With this new warehouse technology taking over the picking, labeling and shipping aspects of fulfillment, your staff will be ready to handle the increased demand for accuracy that comes with Q4. 

Smart Warehouse Storage

In order to compete in today’s online marketplace, eCommerce brands are actively seeking out ways to minimize the time it takes to fulfill orders and get products shipped faster. Part of this approach involves reevaluating the layout of your warehouse and how it can best be organized.

It might sound like a large task, but leveraging data to reorganize an existing warehouse is worth it in the long run. Adopting strategies like automated slotting and optimized storage practices shorten the amount of time it takes for your staff to locate an item and kick off the shipping process. For example, storing your best selling products closest to your packing stations can make a huge impact over time. With warehouse workers no longer traversing the facility for a single product, they can stay focused on the crucial task of ensuring accuracy and efficacy of their shipments.  

As retail giants like Amazon continue to mold consumer expectations, some emerging brands have also turned to micro fulfillment centers as a way of keeping up the pace. 

Traditionally, online retailers have used a single warehouse to fulfill all of their orders. Handling all of your fulfillment from a single location might be an affordable solution in the short term, but once Q4 arrives and orders begin to spike, that warehouse can quickly become overwhelmed. 

Micro fulfillment centers involve renting underused warehouses and extra retail space to provide shippers with an advantage when peak season rolls around. In addition to increasing the amount of available inventory space, micro fulfillment centers shrink the distance between distribution centers and the end customer. 

Modernized fulfillment service providers can also help shorten delivery times by leveraging their multiple locations and customer data. ShipHero, for example, with our 7 North American warehouses, moves your products as close as possible to your customers before they even place an order. 

Once the order is made, the item’s last-mile shipping time is significantly reduced, providing a better buying experience for your customers.

Reporting & Visibility Tools

One of the most important tools you can implement for Q4 is something that ensures you’ll have an understanding of what’s going on inside your warehouse. A clear picture of your existing inventory, order capacity and demand on your staff allows you to anticipate delays before they impact the consumer, giving your brand a leg up when peak season bottlenecks become a possibility. 

Data warehouse tools that facilitate reporting and visibility can come in a few different forms. If you’re handling fulfillment on your own, having a quality warehouse management software, or WMS, backing up your operations is essential. With a reliable WMS, you’ll be able to properly examine the rate of incoming orders, shop for the best carrier rates and replenish your stock for an optimal fulfillment strategy when things get busy. 

If you’re outsourcing your fulfillment, on the other hand, it’s important to partner with a third party that prioritizes visibility for their customers. Fulfillment service providers like ShipHero, that provide detailed warehouse reports, tracking information for each order and flexible integrations are built to take on the shipping process during peak season while keeping you in the loop. Based on the reports you receive from your dependable fulfillment partner, you’ll be better equipped to make decisions about investment, replenishment and improvements with consistent support from fulfillment experts. 

Conclusion 

Over the past few years, the expansion of online shopping during Q4 took the supply chain environment by surprise. Overburdened warehouse staff and shipping lane bottlenecks posed new challenges for eCommerce brands looking to get ahead during the most crucial part of the year. 

Implementing new features like warehouse automation, micro fulfillment centers and visibility tools can give your brand the support it needs to triumph in Q4, while providing flexible and scalable solutions for the next challenges that the supply chain has in store. 

If you’re new to ShipHero Fulfillment, please schedule a meeting today with our experts to learn more about how we can help you get your orders picked, packed and delivered with our fulfillment service. No setup fees, simply pay as you go. ShipHero works to ensure that organizations invest in the solutions that match their needs, to improve productivity, revenue and success.

Click HERE to Schedule a Meeting Today

Why You Can No Longer Set It and Forget It When Talking About Supply Chain

Apr 29, 2022 | Blog

Prior to COVID-19, brands built their fulfillment operations with the assumption that the status quo would last forever. Simply setting up a warehouse, working with a carrier and employing a well trained staff was enough to maintain timely delivery of products without much need to change. 

If you’re reading this article, you probably know that assumption was wrong. Supply chain volatility, for better or worse, is now the norm. Traditional warehouses and their rigid processes no longer have what it takes to help brands thrive, driving warehouse operators to rethink how successful fulfillment can be possible under these new conditions. 

While there is no single cure to every brand’s shipping struggles, many companies have adopted the overarching strategy of supply chain flexibility. 

Supply chain flexibility

Supply chain flexibility refers to a fulfillment team’s ability to rapidly respond and adapt to a changing supply chain environment. One of the biggest lessons learned throughout Covid-19 is that traditional warehouses were not equipped to handle the influx of orders or shipping bottlenecks that quickly became part of everyday life. Responding to new levels of customer demand, raw-material requirements or limited staff bandwidth can seem impossible when the same warehouse processes have carried on for years without adjustment. 

With the goal of supply chain flexibility and agility in mind, brands of all sizes have been busy rethinking how they can best serve their customers without the benefit of predictability or stability on their side. To overcome this hurdle, and to ensure warehouses are prepped for any future surprises, new warehouse technologies are being utilized to anticipate erratic market conditions. 

Trends In Warehouse Automation

Every brand’s fulfillment requirements are a little different, and supply chain solutions that work for one company can look vastly different than the solutions of another. 

Rather than finding a single tool or strategy that cures warehouse issues across the board, companies have tended to embrace a mix of tools that make day-to-day shipping a little less of a headache. Automated pick and pack systems, wearable technology and superior warehouse management software have risen to a new level of prominence as supply chain flexibility becomes more of a priority. 

Automated Pick & Pack Systems 

One way warehouses have minimized the physical demand on their staff is by investing in automated pick and pack systems, such as conveyor belts or collaborative robotics. 

Conveyor systems, an affordable automation option, can really speed up the shipping process. Instead of walking to the item and then back to the packing station, your products can be automatically sent to the station of your choice. While this is a common practice in fulfillment centers, the large footprint and infrastructure requirements make conveyor systems less than ideal when aiming for a flexible supply chain. 

Collaborative robots, on the other hand, provide a picking solution that can be altered at a much lower cost. Rather than spread out across the warehouse floor, these wheeled machines can be customized and instructed where to go and what to pick. If changes need to be made to the warehouse, collaborative robots are easy to reprogram and change.

The manual picking process is where a lot of mistakes can happen. These automation tools take the possibility of human error out of the equation, meaning no mis-ships and a happier pool of customers. With the superior reliability that comes with these adjustments, you’ll be able to guarantee order accuracy while saving money on correcting expensive returns. 

Wearable Technology 

Wearable technology in the warehouse has been around for a while, but never to the advanced level that we see today. Mobile label printing, smartphones and data capturing devices have removed the need for warehouse staff to be in a single location in order to stay connected and efficient. Now, workers can flow throughout the warehouse, completing multiple fulfillment tasks while on the move. 

In a supply chain environment that demands flexibility, incorporating wearable technology can enhance the way your staff ships packages without changing much about the warehouse itself. 

According to foodlogistics.com, integrating wearable technology doesn’t usually mean you’ll have to make changes to your warehouse’s layout. These tools can be highly customizable and can be programmed to fit most working environments.

However, some aspects of how you do fulfillment, such as data capture and software integrations, might need to be adjusted. Before deciding to move forward with these tools, it’s important to get a clear understanding of how it can fit into your existing processes and whether it’s compatible with the tools you already have. 

Warehouse Management Software 

Modern warehouse management software can do a lot more than just help keep you organized. Quality inventory management, data capture and seamless multi-tool integrations are now required for a better shipping experience, and the right WMS can help your brand get there. 

A sophisticated WMS goes a long way when it comes to supply chain flexibility. For example, when a product’s demand spikes, a WMS can provide recommendations on optimal storage strategies and updated replenishment timelines so that you’re never caught off guard. Understanding how your customers behave and interact with your online store can also reveal new and efficient delivery options. 

By integrating your online store, your carriers and any other online tools to a WMS, you’ll be able to drastically improve your ability to leverage data and open up money saving opportunities. 

Conclusion 

The supply chain might be a bit unpredictable at the moment, but by taking the steps to ensure your fulfillment center is adaptable, your brand can stay competitive despite abrupt changes.

With new developments in automation, wearable technology and warehouse management software, supply chain flexibility is attainable without making expensive changes to your warehouse.

If you’re looking for an agile fulfillment partner to help modernize your brand’s delivery process, contact the Fulfillment Experts at ShipHero today.

Click HERE to Schedule a Meeting Today