Elevate your order fulfillment strategy with a dash of ingenuity. How? Enter the world of kitting, where innovation meets seamless efficiency. If your customers regularly order a specific mix of individual items, you can bundle them into one distinctive SKU, offering the combination as a standalone product.
Kitting isn't just about bundling products; it's a game-changer in order fulfillment. Instead of scrambling to assemble items after an order is placed, these pre-bundled SKUs are quick and easy to locate. And here's the jackpot: it's not just value-added services you can outsource to a 3PL. It's a strategic move that slashes costs (think: shipping, warehouse, labor, and materials), streamlines operations, and optimizes your supply chain. Here’s why kitting is a powerful way to drive efficiency and improve the customer experience for your business.
Speedier Delivery
Ah, the dreaded shipping costs! This is a perpetual thorn in the side of every e-commerce business owner. And costs are just one piece of the equation. Delivering quick, accurate shipping is imperative for meeting consumer demand and maintaining a competitive presence in today’s marketplace.
One effective way to improve shipping times? Bulk kitting your most sought-after product combinations, rather than waiting for each order to come in. Adopting this bulk strategy is a powerful way to enhance productivity, streamline operations, and provide faster, more reliable shipping.
Opting for a third-party logistics (3PL) provider to handle your order fulfillment opens the doorway for efficiently and economically kitting your orders. By collaborating with a 3PL, your products will be primed for shipping at the drop of an order, ensuring a seamless and speedy fulfillment experience. What’s more, you can leverage their carrier network to provide quick, two-day shipping: an offering crucial for attracting today’s consumers.
Cost-Saving Benefits
Handling order fulfillment in-house requires a pretty hefty investment of time and resources. From renting storage space and hiring specialized staff to buying equipment and purchasing IT management systems, there’s no shortage of overhead costs to consider. And if you add kitting operations to the mix? You can expect these expenses to increase further to accommodate the extra space and staff. Outsourcing order fulfillment and kitting operations to a 3PL can help reduce costs and ensure your business remains profitable. A 3PL will have the infrastructure, technology, and resources needed to seamlessly scale up your kitting initiatives without the headache that comes with handling it in-house.
Superior Kitting Material Costs
Procuring kitting materials in-house can be costly. When you partner with a 3PL, you can tap into their established network of vendors and obtain bulk pricing on packaging and kitting materials to reduce costs and increase your bottom line. This can also be beneficial from a cost perspective if your business uses branded packaging or offers subscription boxes.
Elevated Inventory Management
Creating kits streamlines your inventory by reducing the number of SKUs, making stock simpler to manage. This is especially advantageous if your customers frequently purchase bundled products, as it minimizes the handling of separate items. Additionally, kitting optimizes warehouse space, leading to cost savings and a reduction in shipping errors. The saved space opens up new storage possibilities and contributes to cutting fulfillment costs. Furthermore, when conducting inventory audits, kitting proves to be a time-saving method, replacing the need to count individual items with a more efficient process focused on kits.
Avoid Dead Stock & Boost Sales
Kitting can be a valuable solution for online retailers facing decreased demand for certain products. It offers a strategic way to sell items that might otherwise become stagnant, or dead stock, aiding in inventory reduction and boosting your inventory turnover ratio.
Providing discounts on kits is one way to incentivize customers effectively. Plus, it’ll streamline their purchasing experience and enhance overall satisfaction. Moreover, creating kits fosters a personalized connection with customers, introducing them to new items in your inventory, and providing gift ideas for future purchases. Kitting is the perfect way to foster loyalty and transform one-time buyers into repeat customers.
Effortless Scalability
From holidays to seasonality, fluctuations in product demand require scalable solutions to optimize resources. Hiring staff and acquiring storage space based on demand spikes isn't practical. 3PL providers offer unparalleled flexibility and can scale up or down based on market changes, turning seasonality risks into opportunities for businesses to manage surges in kitting orders successfully.
Elevate Your Fulfillment Strategy with Custom Kitting
Kitting is a savvy strategy that can yield numerous benefits—from saving time and money to elevating customer satisfaction and streamlining order fulfillment. Whether you opt for pre-built or custom kitting, these innovative solutions can drive revenue growth by optimizing processes and boosting overall efficiency.
At Smart Warehousing, we can seamlessly weave kitting into your order fulfillment process to help move your business forward. Want to hear more? Contact our team to learn how we can help your company thrive through our fulfillment, warehousing, replenishment, and transportation solutions.