Build your business in Canada: Canadian fulfillment explained
Canadian fulfillment is a tool businesses use to dramatically reduce the cost of importing goods to the United States. Items from around the world are shipped in bulk to Canada, where a fulfillment company breaks them down into smaller shipments that can each enter the U.S. tax-free, made possible by the U.S. customs statute Section 321. But Canadian fulfillment companies can help you build your business far beyond simple tax savings.
Turbo charge turnaround time with Canadian fulfillment
Turnaround time is vital to e-commerce; an e-tailer with a poor turnaround time simply won’t survive in today’s competitive and rapid-delivery environment. Frustrated customers will just shop elsewhere. So how fast can you expect a turnaround from a good fulfillment company? Those positioned just over the U.S. border can deliver across North America from one to three days on average, with visible tracking all along the route.
Canadian fulfillment to manage amazon orders
If you’re involved in e-commerce, there’s a pretty good chance you’re selling on Amazon. But after you get an order on Amazon, do you really need to send the items to Amazon for them to store and then re-ship the items to your customers? That’s time-consuming and expensive. And so that’s where Canadian fulfillment can step in to streamline the Amazon marketplace process, by directly accepting and shipping the orders you get on Amazon.
Connect to your site’s shopping cart and more
A fulfillment company’s tie-ins to online shopping carts aren’t limited to Amazon; they can integrate with the shopping carts of almost any retailer’s website, linked directly into a client’s CRM system. Managing multiple standalone systems is a hindrance in today’s fast-moving shipping world and a completely unnecessary impediment if you go with a fulfillment company.
Integrated printing and packaging
Small things make a big difference in e-commerce; packaging inserts greatly affect customer experience, distinguishing professional presentations from more amateur outfits. From product inserts such as coupons and review requests to hang tags and more, the small cost of insert printing pays off in a big way. If you’re working with a good fulfillment company, they can handle those small but critical details.
You can also rely on a fulfillment company for larger and more complex printing: packaging. You don’t have to think of fulfillment companies as just dropping off stuff in plain cardboard boxes. A good one has design and printing services for custom-creating your retail packaging. So, your customers receive products with your branding and professional presentation without the need for your company to physically handle the items.
Canadian fulfillment offers access to in-house inventory
When you work with a fulfillment company that specializes in a market niche, such as health and beauty products, chances are pretty good that items you want are already sitting in their warehouse, ready to go out the door as soon as you need them.
A helping hand with returns
All businesses hate returns. But if you’re in business, you’re going to get them. Research on returns shows that as high as 10% of all purchases are returned, and more online purchases than in-store purchases are sent back. Customers have come to expect to be able to return deliveries, and further that those returns should be free. That adds up to billions of dollars in costs that are absorbed by retailers.
The huge cost of returns isn’t the only serious consideration. Returns can be a complicated matter if you’ve got a bunch of links in your supply chain. To mitigate these problems, you can put return processing in the hands of your fulfillment company. This not only reduces the shipping costs that retailers face but also the costs of checking for damage, storing items, returning them to inventory, and in some cases finding companies that specialize in taking returns to recoup some of the investment.
Most businesses initially turn to Canadian fulfillment to cut costs on import taxes. What they often find is that these Canadian companies can also fulfill their business needs in so many other ways too.
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