Don't Forget Order Fulfillment

You've got your website set up, your shopping cart goes live and your customer service staff is inputting orders from your external sales team. Now the arduous work of taking care of your order management takes place. You have all of these orders coming in, but how do you get them to your fulfillment center correctly and timely? It's called order management. Over the years at Verde, we've had every type of scenario of the client trying to reinvent the wheel of efficiency in this area, but in reality, it's quite simple: Use technology to your advantage. If you don't use technology to help make you efficient, you simply can't get ahead. This is why at Verde we have embraced the constantly changing world of technology, and you should too. Your shopping cart should be integrated into your accounting program through a connector. Your accounting program should be integrated with your fulfillment center. And your fulfillment center should be completely cloud-based, like Verde. This is efficiency at its best. Partner with the best and take nothing for granted.

still Sweating the Small Stuff? You should…

We had been speaking with one particular company about coming on board with Verde for over a year. They were a small business with four employees, 156 styles of products, and sales of just over $800,000 USD. During their busy season, they spent all of their time going to their improvised “garage/warehouse” and shipping the products. They were so busy running their business, they had no time to grow their business with expanded sales and marketing efforts. Their sales had gone flat and they had no time to develop new products, let alone promote them. This company finally took the steps to come on board with Verde during their slow season. The same day the products arrived at Verde, we started shipping for them. The company was finally able to grow its business through the extra time they now had each day. This was over a year ago. To this date, our client is continually growing their sales monthly, and Verde takes care of all warehousing, fulfillment, and logistics globally.”

Don't Underestimate Yourself!

We have a client who has been with us for a year and a half. They were a new company when they started at Verde, with a three-product line, doing 20-30 shipments per day. They reached a point where they were having to struggle for their sales. The owner told me he was thinking of selling the inventory to another company and taking a monthly royalty check. No way! We believed in their product line, their market, and in general, busting your butt to make your business work. We offered to purchase their company, which made the owner think that maybe they actually had something of value. Together we put a plan into action to drive the business forward. We helped them create an ad to hire a sales and marketing person and showed them how to generate leads. We integrated their website into our warehouse management software, which made order/entry seamless and their input/output processes much more efficient. This client is still happily with Verde.

never IGNORE THE DETAILS!

“We visited the offices of a client in Europe to review the procedures and processes they employed Verde for. Turns out they were offering free shipping to their retail stores, which was eroding any sort of margin they had built into their product cost-of-goods. We helped them change their internal shipping structure to offer their retailers only tiered shipping discounts based on the dollar volume of the shipment. We also made sure that we only shipped their products via ground service to try and preserve the remaining margin and keep all of the numbers people happy. This client has doubled sales and shipments despite the down economy.”

only WORK WITH SHIPPING COMPANIES YOU KNOW!

“A client in Australia uses Verde for their North American distribution center. They have a supply chain in place for their production and ship products from Shanghai to their distributors around the world. This client was running into logistical issues trying to arrange remote shipping from China to all points globally using many different freight companies. 25% of the time the products failed to reach their destination without some serious intervention. We stepped in to arrange all of their global logistics from China. We were able to leverage our existing relationships with freight companies we use daily. Now our client is delivering all products around the globe 100% on time and intact.”

Yes - SIZE MATTERS!

“In the world of fulfillment, the size, weight, and labeling of products dictate pick-and-pack efficiencies, shipping rates from factories to the cost-of-goods for the manufacturer. There are still many companies that don’t weigh these potential issues prior to designing a product or its packaging. We encountered this exact scenario with one of our US-based clients when they informed us that they were changing some styling and packaging on their existing product line. We asked them: What’s the total number of products that will fit in a master pack? What’s the total number of master packs per container? These questions threw our client for a loop, but these are the keys to efficiencies and to keeping everyone’s costs down. At our urging, our client reviewed their packaging requirements for retail stores and consumers. They changed their packaging entirely from a non-eco-friendly to using mostly post-consumer recycled packaging, which lowered their cost-of-goods, increased their margins, and made their master cartons and shipping containers that much more efficient.”

DON'T STAND STILL!

“One of our long-established clients manufactures various products off-shore. We helped them bring all of their products into the U.S. to be warehoused and shipped globally from Verde. When the bottom fell out of the economy, our client fell right with it, losing market share and shipping less and less product. In one of our monthly business reviews with them, we asked about other opportunities to market their products into niches not traditionally filled by their type of company. That struck a chord. Through a series of five conference calls with their Director of Sales and Marketing, Verde was able to help the client re-direct their business plan to go after an entirely new market. After a soft launch followed by some aggressive marketing tactics, our client is now shipping more than they ever have with sales increasing monthly."