best business structure for e-commerce

Consumers’ expectations for faster delivery have forced online retailers to keep up with this trend. The survey also found one of the main reasons that online shoppers did not purchase items in their cart was because their estimated shipping costs came out higher than anticipated. Clearly, shipping is important to online customers.

RSL offers order fulfillment services including pick/pack, kitting, returns, and freight services. In 2001, RSL began as Webgistix with a single warehouse and the mission to provide eCommerce retailers with fast, accurate, and cost-effective order fulfillment services. In 2013, Rakuten Group, Inc. acquired Webgistix, enabling RSL to grow over the next eight years. RSL has now grown to 15 warehouses nationwide enabling a 2-day delivery network using ground services. In 2019, Rakuten Group, Inc. acquired FirstMile and IFS360, a Salt Lake City, UT based eCommerce parcel carrier company.

Fulfillment Services: Whether you're a new ecommerce business looking to outsource fulfillment or you've outgrown your current warehousing capacity, a third-party fulfillment service can help you reach your goals. A fulfillment service is a third-party provider that handles the pick and pack, storage, and shipping of your ecommerce orders.

Based on service types, the global market has been further divided into warehousing & storage fulfillment services, bundling fulfillment services, shipping fulfillment services, and others. The shipping fulfillment service segment led the market and accounted for the maximum share of more than 35.6% of the global revenue in 2021. The trade liberalization policies and cross-border shipment agreements have resulted in increased trade and shipping activities. With the proliferation of the e-commerce industry, e-commerce companies prefer to outsource shipping services to third-party service providers and concentrate on other key business operations.

LAS VEGAS, Jan. 18, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Rakuten Super Logistics (RSL), a premier nationwide third-party logistics provider (3PL), today announced the launch of its Xparcel Priority delivery service.

With consumer complaints about lack of quality customer service at all-time highs, retailers should focus on enhancing the in-store experience, rather than using sales associates to pick, pack and ship.

Are retailers overestimating the ability of stores to efficiently pick and pack online orders? What are the obvious and less obvious challenges retailers face using stores as fulfillment centers? Would be interesting to find out if the increase in online sales from in-store pickup impacted in-store sales.

Strategic opportunity, tactical challenges and a developing operating model. In-store picking (shopper for hire) seems like a sensible pick-up in-store option, and perhaps one for quick need items, while other retailer profiles might be better suited for centralized picking. Challenges for stores: Is the inventory count right? Dedication of resource to the task? Filling the cart or helping the customer? That and more—but the strategic value of turning up at a store and having the shopping bags filled for you? Only time will tell.