As the name suggests, a pack and ship service handles the packing and shipping of merchandise. Mostly, they center on providing services to independent retailers who are either unable or simply don’t want the trouble of shipping for themselves. They provide a fantastic substitute to developing and maintaining your own dispatch center.
Pack and Ship vs. Fulfillment Services
Pack and ship services often do not warehouse merchandise, but focus instead on shipping services. Invoices, payments and all contact with customers are still handled by the retailer. These services are especially worthwhile to those who would otherwise require special shipping licenses or insurance in order to ship their merchandise.
Many pack and ship operations use multiple carriers – USPS, FedEx, DHL, UPS and others. Some will also arrange local transport and some provide custom drop off to and from airports. A few will even pick up items as well as send them, so they can function as virtual mail boxes.
Fulfillment services usually handle storage as well as shipping. They may also pick and pack thereby fulfilling all your shipping and storage needs. The main difference between fulfillment services and pack and ship services is that fulfillment services will probably offer to store a reasonable amount of stock for you. They will charge for order assembly in addition to packing and shipping fees.
Pick-up is a service available with pack and ship companies. However for any significant volume, a fulfillment service might be the best approach – just because they offer an all inclusive service, from warehousing straight through to shipping.
Specialty Services
Several pack and ship services will specialize in international deliveries. Their experience with insurance, custom regulations and costs for shipping overseas can be invaluable. Along with this, they sometimes offer one or more of the following:
• Assured delivery – same day, overnight and two-day.
• No size constraints and custom crating for fragile or unique packages.
• Cargo insurance at many levels – important for time-sensitive deliveries, perishables and oversees shipping.
• Package tracking
• Office add-ons on site: copies, supplies, fax, mail boxes and even notary services.
Many small, locally owned pack and ship services will hold items in hand (if you rent a mailbox) and ship them at your direction. They are often not set up for any warehouse functions so this is only practical if you sell small items.
Fulfillment services usually offer a specialty service that pack and ship services don’t: customer contact in the form of receipts sent to your clients, tracking information and in rare cases, billing services. This is a great convenience when customer contact doesn’t require anything other than an email or an invoice placed inside the package.
Deciding between pack and ship and fulfillment services
Pack and ship companies might be the best choice when you only ever ship occasional items or if you handle with expensive items on an occasional basis. Pack and ship services also offer the additional benefit of both sending and receiving packages. They sometimes offer more shipping options than fulfillment services too. This becomes important if you want to send valuable or fragile merchandise, when the loss of even a single item might adversely impact your bottom line. In cases such as this, insurance and tracking are more important than the need to store large amounts of inventory.
Because you start the process at a pack and ship company, you have much more control over when an item actually ships. Depending on where the package is and where the customer is, a pack and ship company might be the only way to get something into your customer’s hands overnight.
Jeff Ehrlich is the owner of FulfillmentPlusNY which delivers <A href=”http://www.fulfillmentplusny.com”>fulfillment warehouse operations</a> for a whole host of customers~clients~accounts~companies~businesses} globally.Contact Jeff for <A href=”http://www.fulfillmentplusny.com/direct-to-consumer/picking-and-packing.cfm”>pick, pack and ship</a> services.