With its rollout of UPS eFulfillment, UPS wants to help small- and medium-sized businesses worldwide with streamlined fulfillment and shipping services for consumers in the U.S. and Canada.
The solution supports purchases and orders from 21 different marketplaces and web stores, including eBay, Wal-Mart, Etsy and Amazon, including Prime. The new platform, according to UPS, augments its suite of custom e-commerce solutions for these companies that often juggle multiple logins, labor and logistics challenges of packing, shipping and tracking sales and managing inventory, as well as regularly updating marketplace listings.
“UPS understands that small- and medium-sized businesses want the same high quality services as large e-commerce companies without the same amount of complexity,” said Kevin Warren, UPS’s chief marketing officer. “We are laser-focused on giving merchants the tools for success by offering this easy-to-use technology platform, full-service fulfillment capabilities and simplified pricing and billing that many smaller business couldn’t afford to offer or build.”
Interested users can tap into UPS’s offer of a risk free 60-day trial for eFulfillment, which handles merchandise storage, after-sale packaging of products and shipping from warehouses strategically located in Shepherdsville, Ky., and Bloomington, Calif. UPS said inventory stored in other locations, like an existing warehouse, can be added to the platform as sales occur. Merchants then select when the package needs to be delivered.
UPS began piloting the program in 2017 to provide cutting-edge fulfillment and logistics options with access to multiple marketplaces. According to the UPS Pulse of the Online Shopper study, more than 96 percent of U.S. online shoppers report making a purchase at a marketplace. With this in mind, companies try to sell on as many marketplaces as possible to access the widest range of potential customers.
The eFulfillment service pricing is bundled so sellers can have a succinct layout of fulfillment costs. Tracking and billing are integrated, which helps reduce the time and effort it takes a business to keep up with the status and cost of shipments.