Topic: So if you're selling things online and you keep products in a warehouse...
Anonymous A started this discussion 12 years ago#34,270
How does this work exactly? Like when somebody buys something from an online store how is it then shipped to the person who ordered it?
I'm familiar with dropshipping but that's not what I'm talking about here. I'm talking about buying things for resale in bulk then storing them in a warehouse.
Anonymous B joined in and replied with this 12 years ago, 6 minutes later[^][v]#472,999
What?
squeegee !first/o5zA joined in and replied with this 12 years ago, 15 minutes later, 22 minutes after the original post[^][v]#473,000
basically the way you'd think it would work. You get a warehouse space, fill it up with inventory, and when you sell something you package it up for shipping, label it, and ship it out. But why wouldn't you just want to drop ship and carry zero inventory? i would imagine it's because you can't get the billing terms or can't meet minimums for even small orders.
if your question has to deal with how to bill for shipping you'll need to probably weigh each item and figure out shipping prices up front and include that at the point of sale. however you want to figure that.
Anonymous D joined in and replied with this 12 years ago, 2 hours later, 2 hours after the original post[^][v]#473,005
In the biz that is called fulfillment. The vendors providing that service vary wildly in features, costs, and requirements. In my observations, they tend to lag behind in technological advances. When dealing with them, you'll have account reps and sales staff that talks big but doesn't quite know enough about their service. Technologies they support and integrate with are almost always closed source and require expensive licenses (think Microsoft Dynamics and Oracle).
One company in this sector is Mainstreet, which was just acquired by Demandware.
squeegee !first/o5zA replied with this 12 years ago, 13 minutes later, 3 hours after the original post[^][v]#473,010
@previous (D)
i wonder at what point an online retailer would need to outsource their warehouse.
small online retailers often do that themselves since there's not much else to do but maintain a website and sit on inventory.
i'm sure larger and probably midsized online stores use fulfillment centers, and that may be what OP was getting at with his question, how does it all work.
but plenty of "mom and pop" online retailers warehouse and ship themselves. using a fancy outsourced service is pretty highfalutin.
Anonymous D replied with this 12 years ago, 26 minutes later, 3 hours after the original post[^][v]#473,019
@previous (squeegee !first/o5zA)
In house fulfillment is possible for small businesses up to probably around $2,000,000 or $4,000,000 in annual revenue (assuming you don't require freight shipping and your average transaction is under $200). The point at which outsourced fulfillment starts to really pay off is probably over $20,000,000 in yearly sales. Things also vary depending on how seasonal the business is. The risks and costs of a business accepting credit cards also grows at $1,000,000 and $10,000,000 in annual revenue as those are thresholds for more strict PCI-DSS standards.
What most fulfillment companies will do is expect you to send them a CSV or XLS of your catalog. You can set whatever product ID or SKU that you want. The full service fulfillment companies will also handle the merchant accounts for authorization of cards, capturing funds, and detecting fraud.
Your business task is to build a website that also uses the catalog data for customer shopping. The customers will add things to carts and when they checkout you'll somehow have to send the order information to the fulfillment center. Some of them expect you to have an API for them to poll against, while others will have an API for you to send the order info.
Good fulfillment vendors will send updates to your website for current inventory levels. They'll also support an API to check order status and shipping tracking information.
Don't forget about returns and exchanges, though! You as the business will have to support those (or set strict policies) and the easiest process is to generate RMA labels to ship goods back to the fulfillment center that are then replaced by whole new orders.
Anonymous D double-posted this 12 years ago, 6 minutes later, 3 hours after the original post[^][v]#473,020
The crappy fulfillment vendors might have slow APIs and poor uptime. If they are hitting your API, they'll want to do it on a schedule and that brings all new problems. If they send the updates in one large batch, you'll probably need to tweak web server configurations to handle the data (easy to do, but tedious to find the right balance). If they're updating in many small requests, your server or cluster might be put under heavy load unless the fulfillment center has effective request throttling.
On top of this all, you'll also need some way to calculate sales tax. That tends to also be the domain of vendors. Yet again you'll run into technical issues like response time and API availability.
Anonymous D triple-posted this 12 years ago, 11 minutes later, 3 hours after the original post[^][v]#473,022
Another issue with outsourced fulfillment vendors is some of your suppliers can have serious quality assurance problems. Depending on the products, you might end up with damaged things delivered to your warehouse or maybe not even the full quantity you've ordered. You will need to negotiate some sort of time for checking that what you've ordered and paid for actually matches what is delivered to the warehouse.
What else would you like to know?
squeegee !first/o5zA replied with this 12 years ago, 37 minutes later, 4 hours after the original post[^][v]#473,032
neat. do you have some connection here or are you just knowledgeable about fulfillment?
sounds like you may be a computer nerd who does nerd stuff for websites?
Anonymous D replied with this 12 years ago, 9 minutes later, 4 hours after the original post[^][v]#473,035
@previous (squeegee !first/o5zA)
I have connections and I do nerd stuff.
squeegee !first/o5zA replied with this 12 years ago, 2 minutes later, 4 hours after the original post[^][v]#473,036
@previous (D)
neat. nerd. Any nerd advice for making an indie game for geeks?
(Edited 17 seconds later.)
Anonymous D replied with this 12 years ago, 3 minutes later, 4 hours after the original post[^][v]#473,037
@previous (squeegee !first/o5zA)
Time travel to 2009 and start on it then.
and become a wizard at C++
(Edited 31 seconds later.)
squeegee !first/o5zA replied with this 12 years ago, 13 minutes later, 4 hours after the original post[^][v]#473,049
@previous (D)
that sounds pretty impossible. what if i only have background in making models for 3d animation? i've been dicking around with making a dog that runs, walks and trots and i'll be able to export that into cryengine on default terrain.
also i'm learning Maya, and i only really know lightwave (but it's been a while) which is similar i guess.
i want to make the dog bite and scratch and do some stuff like roll on the ground and carry stuff in its mouth.
but i can tell this is going to take a while even with all these powerful modern tools around.
also i've never gone beyond animating models and lip synching audio and the like.
so i'm going to be out of my element very soon, but i can see myself getting to the point of animating a "demo" even if it's not "playable" and is only a video of "what could be"
Anonymous E joined in and replied with this 12 years ago, 5 hours later, 10 hours after the original post[^][v]#473,113
@473,037 (D)
If I could travel to 2009, I would immediately begin mining bitcoins.
Meta joined in and replied with this 12 years ago, 7 hours later, 18 hours after the original post[^][v]#473,162
@473,049 (squeegee !first/o5zA)
You should put in a cheat code. Like if you type in the dog's name as MArk Jewmanbergstein it immediately starts doubling in weight every five seconds.
(Edited 14 seconds later.)
dw !jdTkvovFCQ joined in and replied with this 12 years ago, 39 minutes later, 19 hours after the original post[^][v]#473,164