Why Drop Shipping Is Inevitable
In recent years, we’ve all seen a number of high-profile retailers close their doors or file for bankruptcy simply because they were unable to navigate the rapidly changing consumer mindset. The example: on-line shoppers grew by 20 million between 2015 and 2016 alone. In fact, the National Retail Federation (NRF) is only predicting 3-5% growth in traditional brick and mortar retail sales in 2017. On the other hand, the NRF expects online retail to grow 8-12% — up to three times higher than the growth rate of the broader industry.
This is why we’re seeing so many of the surviving Big Box Retailers expanding into the direct to consumer drop ship market. After all it’s worked well for the pioneers like Amazon, Wayfair, Overstock, Hayneedle, etc. etc., and it’s working for them.
It’s very advantageous. All the retailer needs to do is work with suppliers to resell their products on their on-line marketplace. They can have as many suppliers as they want, listing all of the products that would be attractive to their customers, and they don’t have to worry about warehousing to store those products since you, the supplier, are managing the inventory. As the middleman, they collect the payment and then pay their suppliers. All in all, a pretty good business model for them.
Now, it may already be part of your business model, but as a supplier are you ready for even more pressure to drop ship directly to consumers? Given the trend, it seems to be coming.
Drop shipping means exponentially more orders to process with more employees needed to handle invoices, create packing slips and custom branded 3rd party packing slips, as well as more EDI transactions to manage and pay for. Not to mention much shorter delivery deadlines.
Given that situation, what if you could process a drop ship order in 8 seconds or less? By this, I mean receiving orders from your customer retailers and e-tailers, managing all of their EDI transactions, processing and invoicing orders through your ERP and accounting system, creating packing slips and custom branded 3rd party shipping labels and getting them to the warehouse for pick, pack and ship – 24 hours per day, seven days per week – even when there’s no one in the office.
AND process that drop ship order at roughly the same processing cost as a large bulk order.
OPAL does this for you. Originally designed and built for a manufacturer in the pet industry to handle not only their bulk shipment orders but to handle the ever increasing workload associated with drop shipping as that part of their business grew, OPAL enabled them to reduce their order processing staff from four employees to one part-time employee.
So, what can it do for your business? OPAL enables you to take on more and more direct to consumer drop shipping business so that you can grow beyond what you are today and remain competitive and profitable in the future.