As an ecommerce business owner, you have a ton on your plate. And if you’re like other ecommerce businesses today, you often don’t have time or bandwidth to manage your shipping and logistics needs to stay competitive with consumer demand. As a result, many businesses are partnering with a third-party logistics provider (or 3PL) to outsource these key needs.
Yet no two 3PLs are the same, so aligning your company with the right partner is important. A good 3PL or warehouse partner will prioritize order fulfillment as a competitive strategy for your business. And with customer expectations shifting towards faster, more convenient delivery options, your 3PL partner will offer strategies to enhance your order fulfillment capabilities to keep your customers satisfied.
An order fulfillment strategy that’s making a major impact on ecommerce companies like yours is kitting, and it could be just what you need to achieve your next stage of company growth.
Kitting and Its Benefits Explained
Kitting is all about efficiency in the warehouse picking and shipping process. Kitting pulls multiple items and packages them together under one new SKU or product. This new item or “kit” is shipped to the customer in a single package. Examples of kitting include popular subscription or gift boxes, ready-to-order hobby sets, or seasonal product bundles.
Instead of picking individual items from a warehouse and shipping them separately, kitting saves you both time and money by picking commonly ordered items ahead of time, packaging them together, and then shipping them all at once. Kitting provides a number of important benefits:
- Shorter shipping times
- Reduced packaging costs
- Streamlined warehouse processes
- Easier order tracking and inventory management
Perhaps most importantly, with faster shipping and reduced logistics costs, kitting ultimately makes your customers happier. Ready to utilize kitting in your business? Here’s what you need to prioritize in a kitting warehouse partner or 3PL.
Here’s What Your Kitting Warehouse Partner Should Offer
Full-Service Supply Chain Capabilities
When seeking a kitting warehouse partner, you should prioritize a 3PL that does it all. Look for partner with one-stop-shop capabilities like:
- Inventory replenishment
- Omnichannel fulfillment
- Efficient warehousing (including cold chain management, if needed)
- Dependable transportation services
You’re already juggling several responsibilities as an ecommerce business. The last thing you need is the additional responsibility of managing multiple 3PLs who specialize in different logistics needs (including kitting). This only increases the chance for fulfillment errors, as well as increased costs. Choose a 3PL who can take care of everything for you instead.
Custom Packaging
There are more “moving parts” in kitting, with multiple items packaged together in one box. Therefore, you need a kitting warehouse partner or 3PL that can get your packaging right with custom packaging services.
This looks like branded or white-labeling services for your shipping boxes and contents inside, as well as the ability to source premium packing materials like bubble wrap or filler paper, all at affordable prices. Custom packaging that makes your product kits stand out will boost your brand image and impress your customers—a winning combination for ecommerce companies like yours in today’s competitive market.
Innovative, Efficient Management Systems and Technology
Ideally, you want a kitting partner who has the capability of creating new SKUs for your entire product kits to reduce the number of SKUs to manage in your inventory. Your kitting partner should offer robust and efficient tracking systems to track these SKUs, keep tabs on the kitting process, and make inventory management easier to control and much more accurate.
This can look like innovative management software that provides real-time inventory levels (and alerts), purchase order needs, and transaction-level updates. Such technology should integrate seamlessly with your current systems as well.
Nationwide Facilities
Facilities matter when identifying a kitting warehouse partner. Go ahead and scratch off your list any 3PLs who either have one warehouse or fulfillment center or offer facilities only in a select region. Instead, concentrate your search on kitting partners who utilize multiple facilities nationwide, including facilities geographically close to you. This helps reduce supply chain vulnerabilities or shipping delays due to worker shortages or natural disasters. Plus, it increases the potential for faster shipping when your fulfillment centers are closer to your customers.
Need a Kitting Warehouse Partner? We’ve Got You at Smart Warehousing
Kitting can be an excellent fulfillment strategy, but choosing the right warehouse partner or 3PL is vital to making it a success in your company. Thankfully, at Smart Warehousing, we are the kitting experts you need. Our full-service capabilities include fulfillment, warehousing, replenishment, transportation, and more, allowing your ecommerce logistics to thrive. Contact us today to learn how our partnership can impact your company.