Micro Fulfillment
It's a fact that everyone already knows, no matter what the catalyst, that the type of retail business is increasingly leaning online. In addition, it has become quite normal to find the product you purchased online the night before at your doorstep the next morning. In order to respond to this online consumption culture, many companies are converting large offline stores to semi-sark store formats and switching to a system that fulfills online orders as well. Or, set up a pop-up e-commerce center within a local distribution center to fulfill online orders.
*Dark Store: A supermarket dedicated to online shopping
Sometimes traditional distribution center systems and networks are not agile enough to rapidly changing consumer needs, and the competition for delivery times is becoming increasingly fierce. In this situation, a solution called "micro order processing" can be a good answer for many 3PL and small e-commerce companies.
Micro-fulfillment is the placement of small distribution center in densely populated cities to fulfill orders as close to consumers as possible, giving small retailers a competitive edge in delivery times. It shows tremendous advantages in terms of infrastructure and shipping costs as well, making the last mile to consumers shorter and cheaper.
So to speak, the Semi-Dark Store and Pop-Up E-Commerce Center discribed above are also a type of MFC built in existing offline stores and distribution centers. You can also convert your current store's idle space, such as a garage, parking lot or basement, into an MFC.
Importantly, depending on how efficiently a MFC is deployed, order processing costs can be reduced by up to 75%, so thanks to the development of various micro-order processing strategies, even small and medium-sized e-commerce companies can provide sufficient service to their customers without huge investment of money or time.
Now, we must recognize that as online e-commerce becomes the main consumption form, the sales process no longer ends in a one-dimensional line like before, but extends to the delivery of goods to the orderer. Now we have to think about how to efficiently organize and build a longer sales process.