Retail Shipping

[00:00:00]Hey everyone, this is Karen Waksman, founder of Retail MBA. Today we're going to be talking about retail shipping. So if you have a great product perfect for stores and trying to understand shipping and your options for chain stores, this little training will give you something to think about in regards to retail shipping. With that said, let's get started on today's training.

[00:00:18]So let's talk about 3PL companies, what it means, and how it's relevant to chain stores selling.

[00:00:26]3PL stands for third-party logistics.

[00:00:29]These are companies that can support you with fulfillment of delivery of products, warehousing, all the good stuff related to the logistics aspects of working with a chain store, getting the product out into the world. So if I had a new product, I have different ways of selling to a retailer, but I also have different ways of handling the logistics based on how I work with them. Generally speaking, if I don't want to put a bunch of stuff in my garage or buy a little warehousing space or do whatever, I would work with a third-party logistics company for them handling the shipping of my products. So you work with overseas, they ship the products. It could go to your 3PL company based on what you're looking for. Obviously, there's different types of 3PL companies and what they do, but even FedEx is considered a 3PL company in some aspects. So basically, they are major one in the US and Canada. So really, 3PL companies help you deliver goods and sometimes handle all order fulfillment.

[00:01:43]So they can go pretty deep these days.

[00:01:45]Some of them will handle the e-commerce aspects of things, meaning if you get an order through a.com and it can ship it out.

[00:01:56]Some of them can handle EDI software solutions and so forth, which means when if you review my other video on EDI EDI basically is a software you're going to need in order to work with retail chains. Go to YouTube for Retail MBA and do a search for EDI. They have that. I did a video on that or I'm on my website retailnba.com. I explain that more in detail, but essentially there's certain softwares you're going to need to work with retail chains and some of these third-party logistics companies can set that up with you so that you don't That's one less thing to do if you're already dealing with fulfillment and shipping and all the things. Maybe they can handle all the goodies and then you don't have to do a lot. Just get the goods out. So that's something to consider. They can handle the technology, the electronics of things and they work with lots of different categories, not just retail. They fulfill stuff for all obviously all types of companies, but for the thing about 3PLs is you're looking for one that's good with the chain stores.

[00:02:57]You don't want ones that are working with other types of companies because they can fulfill orders mistakenly. There's lots of little things going on. You have codes, you have packaging. You need to make sure that they're well-known or at least good at delivering products. You can get a lot of chargeback from retail chains if they make mistakes. A chargeback means that you ship your product to a chain store when the product is supposed to be delivered and they made a mistake and they charge you back for the mistakes because chain stores are looking for an organized vendor who don't make mistakes. And so ultimately 3PL companies can make your life life a lot easier. We recently launched a series of products for our own brands and had to look at where would we store the products? How would we ship it? Can we afford it? Because that's the other thing. When you're working with these chain stores, depending on your product, if you have very little money to work with, you have to think about can you give the 3PL company the money?

[00:04:02]Do you have it? If you sell a product, some products are really expensive, some are not. So then you look at all aspects. So what I would do is I'd look at can I put it in our garage? Can I put it in a space? Is it cheaper? I'm looking at all the math because ultimately that comes out of my pocket, right? As a company, I need to make sure that the math is accurate and correct.

[00:04:26]They're charging too much, then that can backfire later on and that's how companies go under if they don't do their due diligence. So make sure that you're digging around looking for the correct 3PL company for you. The good news is we created a nice list of 3PL companies listed on retailmba.com. You can just do a search. And ultimately it's there to support you. Karen Waksal, Retail MBA. Hope that makes sense about 3PL companies. Thanks so much.