With this influx, Aquaproofs would struggle to handle the growth if sales continued at that level. It’d become more difficult to stay on top of timescales and meet the needs of their customers, without letting their service level drop. Not to mention the cost involved in single-handedly sustaining that level of growth.
There posed the ultimatum: find an in-house solution at a reasonable cost or outsource to an affordable 3PL.
In-house fulfilment is great when you can do it, but it does come with its issues. The main one being cost. An increase in sales requires an increase in staff, and Aquaproofs would have to hire a warehouse operative to get orders out the door. Which leads to another problem – space. They would need to upgrade their current garage space by renting a small warehouse.
As every eCommerce business knows, staff and storage don’t come cheap.
Aquaproofs would end up spending at least £20k+ – and that’s before even taking things like shipping costs into account. Shipping costs that would be much higher due to the relatively small quantities being sent, and therefore wouldn’t warrant shipping discounts.
The second issue is hassle. It takes a great deal of time and effort to source suitable storage, recruit staff, track shipping and keep your business ticking along – let alone waiting for couriers to arrive with deliveries or collect parcels for shipping. Leaving no time to focus on growth and other areas of development.
Whereas if they chose to hand the responsibility over to a 3PL, they’d remove all the pressure of managing it themselves. Aquaproofs would be able to keep a lean, agile team and have more time to focus on product development, customer satisfaction and marketing – leaving the 3PL to deal with the burden of order fulfilment.
Combined with access to an experienced team, a secure storage facility and discounted shipping rates – all wrapped up in an easy-to-use software – opting for a 3PL seemed to be the most sensible and cost-effective solution for Aquaproofs.
‘We were thrilled to see our name in The Telegraph and a surge of sales off the back of it – the kind of surge we wanted to be a regular thing. But we knew the costs involved in maintaining that level of growth in-house. We were at a really crucial point where we had to weigh up the pros and cons of doing it ourselves, and when the cons came out on top, we started looking into 3PLs.’ – Aquaproofs