Toward Successful E-Fulfillment
It's All in The SKU
By Edmond Mesrobian and Brian Ringer
E-retailers, also commonly referred to as "e-tailers," rushing to market often focus on the user or perceptual aspects of their e-commerce sites, such as their appearance, content, and product organization. However, the "back-office" subsystems of e-commerce sites -- those that provide the link between the user experience and the actual physical delivery of goods to the customer -- continue to be a challenge. These parts, which include inventory management, order capture, and management and reconciliation, often prove to be more difficult than the construction of the site itself. This article presents an overview of the fulfillment process and discusses how some of these logistics and data-management problems are being solved at our firm, CheckOut.com.
While off-the-shelf solutions exist to solve some pieces of the fulfillment problem -- relational databases and shopping-cart applications, for example -- no turnkey packages exist currently to provide complete integration with third-party fulfillment partners such as Fingerhut, Valley Media, or Alliance Entertainment. The developers of an e-commerce site must be responsible for setting up product/inventory master synchronization, pricing, inventory status, invoicing, and final reconciliation. We'll explore the challenges that drop-ship e-commerce shops face when they build and manage infrastructures that interact with third-party fulfillment partners.
The Fulfillment Process
A series of coordinated steps is required to bridge the gap between a customer browsing an e-commerce site and actually purchasing and receiving an ordered product (see
