The ecommerce industry continues to grow rapidly, creating both opportunities and challenges for businesses. As order volumes increase and customer expectations rise, many companies find it difficult to deliver the fast, reliable fulfilment experience that customers expect.
That’s why more ecommerce businesses are turning to third-party logistics (3PL) providers like Amazon Multi-Channel Fulfilment (MCF) to simplify operations, reduce costs, and improve delivery performance.
Below are five of the biggest order fulfilment challenges that ecommerce companies face today and how a 3PL provider can help overcome them.
Avoiding stockouts
Stockouts can lead to lost sales, reduced customer trust, and long-term damage to your brand reputation. They often occur due to inaccurate forecasting, supply chain disruptions, or poor inventory visibility.
MCF helps prevent stockouts while optimising your inventory management by enabling you to consolidate your inventory into a single pool that supports all your sales channels.
Minimising order processing time
Customers expect to receive their orders quickly. Slow order processing can lead to delivery delays and a poor shopping experience.
With MCF, you can minimise processing time and accelerate delivery. MCF offers two click-to-door speeds: Standard (two to three calendar days) and Expedited (one calendar day), powered by Amazon’s fulfilment network and automated operations.
During the 2024 peak season, MCF maintained an average delivery speed of 1.3 calendar days for expedited shipments, delivering seven days a week¹.
This allows businesses to maintain greater than 99% on-time delivery rates and a 99.98% undamaged package delivery rate², ensuring every order arrives quickly and safely.
Integrating back-end systems
Many ecommerce businesses use multiple systems for order management, inventory, and shipping. MCF solves this with multiple ntegrations and developer-friendly APIs, making it easy to connect your systems and automate fulfilment workflows across all your channels.
Learn more about MCF integrations.
Managing multi-unit orders
Fulfilling multi-unit orders can be complex and expensive, especially when items are stored across different warehouses.
With MCF, you can streamline multi-unit fulfilment by consolidating your inventory and taking advantage of up to 25% discounts on multi-unit orders.
Amazon’s advanced warehouse management systems enable efficient picking, packing, and shipping, reducing operational costs while maintaining fast delivery times.
Handling seasonal spikes and supply chain volatility
Seasonal surges, promotions, and unexpected disruptions can strain your fulfilment operations.
MCF’s flexible network scales with your business, ensuring you have the capacity, labour, and delivery speed needed during peak periods.
By leveraging Amazon’s connected network of fulfilment centres and forecasting tools, you can stay agile and continue delivering a consistent, high-quality experience even during demand spikes.
Streamline operations with trusted fulfilment
Partnering with a trusted 3PL provider like Amazon Multi-Channel Fulfilment enables you to stay ahead by delivering quickly, reducing costs, and improving customer satisfaction.
¹ Based on all MCF standard-sized orders placed and shipped with expedited speed during November 2024 through December 2024 in the United Kingdom.
² Based on all orders fulfilled by MCF in the UK from January 2023 through March 2024.
