It’s often a point of debate whether third party warehousing helps small businesses or not. The large businesses need to ship bulks amounts of goods on regular basis to their customers. Also, they need to store their goods well in a safe and secured condition unless demand arises from the customers. However, this is often not the case with the small businesses. It’s commonly agreed that small businesses do not need to ship bulk volumes of goods to the customers on regular basis and hence do not need third party warehousing.
However, small businesses need 3PL warehousing in order to expand their product lines, sales and market reach. Out of these, market reach is mainly important as it can lead the other two. More the consumers get to know about your brand, more they will order products and purchase them. Hence, greater will be your sales and subsequently, more the number of products you offer when your company invests in inventory. The small and medium businesses start selling on online portals through which they gain more exposure. This comes with more number of orders. This also comes with the need to meet all the orders, which might become unmanageable for the SMBs. Hence, 3pl warehouses help a lot.
By outsourcing third party logistics, shipping cost can be reduced to a great extent. Fr a small business, curtailing shipping cost can help a lot. The cost cutting expenditure helps the companies to reinvest in inventory. 3PLs also help the small businesses in a wide range of areas. The small and medium businesses can leverage a 3pl warehouse Perth for a particular service and treat their fees as business expense after their services are rendered. However, having warehousing facility in-house can need a major investment in the form of capital.
In addition to this cost cutting expenditure, 3PLs also offer fringe benefits. They let the small and medium businesses extend their market reach geographically with the help of third party logistics located outside the business’s own area. All the more, the 3PLs offer multiple shippers for small and medium businesses. These shippers ship the volumes in order to negotiate more favourable shipping rates. Third party logistics often store the inventories of small and medium business’s inventories in different distribution centres all across the world. This implies that the 3PLs can put the small business’s products nearer to their customers. This also reduces the shipping cost of the small and medium businesses.
The best part of hiring third party logistics is that the small and medium businesses can offer inventory management services. This implies that the small and medium businesses will not have to worry about maintaining any inventory records. The 3PL warehouses informs the businesses how much of their products are there in their inventories. Accordingly, the small and medium businesses place restocking orders.