Frequently Asked Questions

1. Save Time and Money

Eliminate the need to buy or rent warehouse space, logistics operations, labour and technology required for expanding in-house fulfilment.

As your business grows, fulfilling orders yourself becomes more and more expensive. These costs include space, equipment and warehouse managment software.

Save time by outsourcing fulfilment tasks, instead of spending time packing boxes, standingin line at the post office, or building out fulfiment infrastructure, working with Assured Fulfilment gives you time back to focus on more strategic initiatives, such as product development and marketing.

2. Leverage Industry Expertise

As a business professional, chances are you don’t have the time to become well-versed in every detail of shipping and logistics. Assured Fulfilment can help, staffed by logistics professionals who are knowledgeable and up-to-date with the latest industry trends and complexities — so you don’t have to be.

Assured Fulfilment has the technical resources and partner networks you need — including marketing agencies, custom packaging providers, and more — that allows us to constantly improve supply chain efficiency and make supply chain optimisations to help drive your business success.

Here are three signs you’re ready to outsource fulfilment to Assured Fulfilment:

1. You’re shipping over 100 orders per month

While there’s no magic number, if your order volume has increased and you can’t keep up, it’s time to outsource to shippers. It’s at the point when you’re asking friends and family members to help you pack boxes or you’re staying up into the late hours of the night just to meet demand.

This is a problem because you’re swamped by low-value activities that don’t generate revenue, and it’s holding you back from achieving growth. And as you continue to grow, you will spend more time on fulfilment and less time running your business

Every hour you spend reacting to new orders that come in — packing items, printing labels, driving to the post office, waiting in line, and so on — you’re missing the opportunity to acquire more customers, develop new products, and launch marketing campaigns.

2. You’re running out of space to store inventory

As your order volume grows, you’ll need more inventory on hand at any given time. If you’re fulfilling orders from home, it can be hard to find the storage space. A 3PL warehouse can save you from a garage or living room filled to the brim with product..

Outsourcing inventory warehousing and order fulfilment to Assured Fulfilment can help you stay organized and manage inventory more efficiently. You can also grow your product line without worrying about inventory storage limitations.

3. You want to offer free 2-day shipping

Amazon has made free 2-day shipping the standard. But if you’re self-fulfilling orders, offering free 2-day shipping can take a huge toll on your margins.

Working with Assured Fulfilment could make offering free 2-day shipping more feasible and affordable.

Partnering with Assured Fulfilment may seem like a no-brainer by now — it can help your business save time and money, freeing up resources to focus instead on product development, marketing, and business growth.

To see if Assured Fulfilment is for you, please feel free to contact us using the form below and one of our specialists will help you understand if we’re a good fit for your business.

Receiving

For Assured Fulfilment to ship your orders it needs inventory to hand. The “receiving” of inventory in our warehouse refers to the acceptance of incoming inventory followed by its storage.

You will let us know which products we will be receiving and how many units. This helps us stay organized and timely with receiving, meaning we can start fulfilling your orders more quickly and efficiently.

Warehousing

Once we receive your inventory, we store your items in our warehouse. Each SKU has a separate dedicated storage location. It’s important to tell us how much stock to hold so enough storage space is reserved for your current inventory — as your product lines and order volumes grow, your storage will need to scale too, so you’ll need to keep us informed about this.

Picking

When a customer places an order, it’s time for the Assured Fulfilment process to begin. (You may have heard the phrase “pick-and-pack fulfilment” before — this is the first half of that.) You can manually upload orders to the Assured Fulfilment system. Sometimes, this involves spreadsheets including order details, customers’ shipping details, and more. This can be a less efficient and complex way to manage orders.

Assured Fulfilment can provide sophisticated technology that integrates directly with your ecommerce platform or marketplace. These 3PL fulfilment software integrations bring orders, shipments, inventory tracking, stock levels and more together in one place to streamline the fulfilment process for more automated shipping.

This includes automatically pushing customers’ online orders to Assured Fulfilment as soon as they’re placed.

When an order is sent to Assured Fulfilment, it is assigned to the warehouse picking team. The picker receives a picking list of the items, quantities, and storage locations at the facility to collect the ordered products from their respective locations.

Packing

When all items in an order have been picked, it’s time to get them securely packed for shipping. The packing materials used will depend on your brand preferences, and the items being shipped.

The most common standard packing materials include:

• Unbranded boxes

• Padded bag mailers

• Poly bags

• Packing tape

• Protective padding

As experienced shippers, Assured Fulfilment can help you choose the best packing materials to both protect your products and achieve the lowest practical dimensional weight. They can also optimize packages so that you don’t have to split shipments.

Using the right packing materials can help keep logistics costs low.

If you want your brand to shine through your shipping, make sure you consider custom packaging, such as custom boxes and inserts. Often, receiving a package is the first in-person experience a customer has with your brand, so branded packaging can make a big impression.

Shipping

The next step is shipping your order. Assured Fulfilment will purchase and print shipping labels on your behalf. Assured Fulfilment compare shipping costs from a variety of carriers. This helps Assured Fulfilment offer clients the most affordable pricing possible for the delivery speed that each customer chooses.

Carriers such as DHL, DPD, and UPS pick up orders to ship. The carrier and shipping speed for each order depend on the service selected for the end customer. Once the order ships, using the integrated technology mentioned above, Assured Fulfilment can automatically push tracking details to merchants’ online stores.

Returns

Assured Fulfilment can also facilitate return processing services on your behalf. If a customer returns an order by shipping it back to Assured Fulfilment, we will process the return and restock or dispose of the item depending on your policies and your preferences.

You can choose to have Assured Fulfilment provide return shipping labels for your customers. This offers convenience for both you and your customers; you won’t have to handle returns in-house, and customers can easily track the status of their return order.

We'd be delighted to help you expand and manage your online store fulfilment.

Please feel free to contact us for more information and tailored pricing.

“Assured Fulfilment can process things more quickly than we could in-house and at scale. These time savings translate directly into cost savings.”

Here is a clear outline of outsourced logistics costs and their definitions:

Onboarding costs

Costs to get fulfilment services and techology integrations up and running.

Inventory receiving costs

The acceptance and storage of incoming inventory. Depending on your specific requirements these will be charged in different ways, including per-unit, per-pallet, flat rates, or per-hour.

Inventory storage costs

When you store your inventory at Assured Fulfilment’s fulfilment centre, charges apply for storage space. Warehousing fees range from per-SKU or per-unit storage to a fixed fee for each bin, shelf, or pallet used.

Order pick and pack costs

These are charged on a per-pick basis, which means you pay a fee for each item included in an order.

Packaging costs

Packing materials such as boxes and padding are itemised as separate line items, or included as part of fulfilment services; this will be agreed as part of the initial set-up process.

Kitting costs

Kitting and assembly refers to any unique accommodations for the way in which items are arranged, or packed before shipping. Because this service is specific to each job, kitting fees can vary.

Shipping costs

The amount Assured Fulfilment charges to ship an order from their fulfilment centre to your customer’s doorstep. Shipping costs take a variety of factors into account, including shipping speed, delivery location, size and weight.

Contact Us - For a Tailored Quotation

Please feel free to contact us for more information and tailored pricing.