Fullfilment Systems

Sales can be kind of fun. (OK, lots of fun for many). It's nice to open envelopes with checks or money orders in them. It's fun to login to PayPal and see your balance going up, not down. Unfortunately, that won't continue unless you get your products shipped promptly, to the right buyers, packaged to prevent damage, at the least possible cost.

That game is called "Fullfilment" and it is surprisingly hard to do well. Amazon will do it for you for only "55%" of your gross but you have to have awesome margins to make that look attractive. At the same time you have to think they have a realistic understanding of just how difficult fullfilment is.

To make fullfilment work you have to build systems that prevent mistakes and which promote efficiency. The system must ensure the proper label goes onto the right box. Etc. It is not easy.

I am working from home with limited space because I don't want to start feeding rent and utilities costs to the overhead monster. That limited the things I can do in the name of efficient fullfilment. It doesn't help that I find the whole subject boring in the extreme. (That's why I am sitting here writing about it, instead of getting it done.)

Determining package weight. My system for determining weight is to fill each of the priority mail boxes I expect to use with packing peanuts and bubble wrap and weigh it on an accurate scale. I put those weights into a spreadsheet file. When I am preparing an item for sale I weigh it and add the packaging weight. This gives me an accurate shipping weight without actually having to package the item.