The world is constantly changing—and the pace of change is increasing every day. Whether it’s a new climate change issue or a new social media platform, there’s always something new on the horizon. The same is true in business. Businesses are constantly finding new strategies to stay up-to-date, and to stay competitive. For businesses seeking to thrive today, an important consideration is fulfillment strategy. You’ve probably heard of omnichannel fulfillment. What is it, and how does it compare with multi-channel fulfillment? And how do you decide what’s the right fulfillment strategy for your business?

Understanding Omnichannel Fulfillment

With omnichannel fulfillment, all sales channels have one inventory and order fulfillment process for all the sales channels. In contrast, with multi-channel fulfillment, each sales channel has its own inventory and fulfillment process just for that channel.

Omnichannel fulfillment is a unified process of choosing, packing, and shipping orders that are sold across physical stores, sales channels, and online marketplaces. Rather than solely fulfilling orders from just one source, the omnichannel fulfillment strategy requires distributing inventory from various sources as precisely as possible so that the risks of overselling or overstocking can be avoided. This type of fulfillment strategy is a great option to implement if your business is in need of support for larger order quantities while simultaneously exceeding the consumers’ needs and expectations.

Multi-channel fulfillment and omnichannel fulfillment might seem almost identical. While they can overlap, here’s a summary of each:

Keep in mind you could have an omnichannel fulfillment strategy with some multi-channel fulfillment aspects, depending on your overall strategy. For example, in addition to fulfilling sales from brick-and-mortar stores and your own website and e-commerce platform, you could also sell products on Amazon and fulfill those orders using Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA). In this case, FBA would be a multi-channel fulfillment process within a larger omnichannel strategy.To learn more about Amazon FBA, check out our blog here.

Benefits of Omnichannel Fulfillment

An omnichannel fulfillment strategy can offer the following benefits for your business enterprise:

• More likelihood of sales and revenue enhancement
• Higher level of overall order efficiency and report accuracy
• Reduces costs of finding alternative sales channels
• Increase in brand visibility amongst e-commerce platforms
• Allows for more flexibility in fulfillment options
• Opportunities for utilization of new sales channels

To realize all these benefits and identify the right fulfillment strategy for your business, you need a highly flexible and scalable fulfillment solution.

Next Steps

There’s always going to be hurdles to overcome when it comes to strategizing the best options for your business. It can range from integrating ERPs to dealing with the complexities of an e-commerce business or navigating around shipping software. ShipHawk can implement the right fulfillment strategy for your enterprise. To learn more about how ShipHawk can help your organization save time and money, contact us today.