EBay is a good marketplace which has helped a lot of e-commerce sellers open their stores with very small budget, but it’s basically all about making sales, unlike Amazon, eBay doesn’t have the dedicated fulfillment service (there is no fulfillment by eBay). In this case, the sellers need an eBay fulfillment partner, or they have to deal with all the logistics by themselves. There are some third-party fulfillment companies have developed fulfillment services specifically for eBay sellers, the eBay fulfillment services have some specific features to meet the eBay sellers’ needs.
What’s the essential functions of the eBay fulfillment service?
Provides eBay fulfillment plug-in. The eBay fulfillment plug-in is one of the most essential parts in eBay fulfillment service, it can integrate one or multiple eBay stores with the fulfillment partner’s system, and achieve automated data sync, such as order sync, inventory sync or tracking number sync.
Supports multiple suppliers. EBay is a comprehensive e-commerce website, the sellers can sell items listed in very different categories in one store, this usually involves sourcing from multiple suppliers and makes the inventory management complicated. Quality eBay fulfillment service has to support multiple suppliers and be capable to handle the inventory centrally.
Includes exchange & refund services. Most of the eBay stores are retail stores, they face to the end consumers directly and the sellers have to deal with exchange and refund almost everyday. The exchange and refund services can save a lot of hassles and ensures that the seller can pay more attention to the sales itself.
After knowing the necessary functions, let’s move on to the next question:
How to choose the eBay fulfillment service?
Choose the right location. Choosing the right fulfillment center location matters a lot, especially for the global shipping business, whose logistics fee normally occupies a large portion of the regular expense. It’s better to be near the source or near the customer. Since the customers are world-wide, only the big company like Amazon can afford multiple warehouses in different countries, so it’s wise to choose a fulfillment partner locates in the same country with your suppliers. For the eBay sellers who source from Alibaba or other Chinese wholesale platforms, it’s better to choose a third-party fulfillment company in China.
Investigate your fulfillment partner in multiple aspects. The eBay fulfillment service needs expertise in different aspects.
– Tech capabilities. As was mentioned above, eBay fulfillment services are suppose to include a well developed fulfillment plug-in. It needs an experienced development team to ensure the eBay plug-in runs well. More than that, the third-party fulfillment company with strong tech team can provide tech support for the customers as well.
– Experiences. It can take years of experience accumulation to achieve optimized manual operation, efficient inventory management, flexible global shipping, etc. So please be cautious to choose the new founded companies, order fulfillment isn’t something that anyone who owns a warehouse can handle.
Place test orders. When looking for new suppliers, the sellers usually ask the supplier to send several samples, it’s called placing test orders. You can do the same to your new fulfillment partner. Give them a batch of orders to fulfill, then you can see the service quality and decide to develop a long-term cooperation with them or not.
Profile
ChinaDivision is a China local order fulfillment company which provides full-service order fulfillment for e-commerce sellers and crowd-funding project creators. The customer oriented services include order fulfillment, global shipping, value-added services and more. If you are interested in our Ebay, Shopify fulfillment app, Woocommerce fulfillment software, just get ChinaDivision free order fulfillment software.
