Let’s keep this short and sweet.
If you are selling your product and packing up boxes from your house or garage and driving everything to the post office, that’s fulfillment.
If you have a small shop and are using every corner to store inventory and paying someone to pack orders and ship them, that’s fulfillment.
Immediately with a fulfillment center:
And passively:
What can you expect from a fulfillment center:
And what would you expect to pay for these services?
To keep this simple, the rate depends on the volume, number of SKUs, dimensions, and complexity of your orders. A standard operation would be 1000+ orders per month of a parcel the size of a shoe box with 2-3 items per box.
What you’d expect to pay is the receiving/handling of your inventory, the storage/management, pick/pick and kitting, and shipping.
That’s the short and sweet on fulfillment, and is by no means an exhaustive list, but a great introduction to help you understand if you’re ready for an upgrade!