About a year ago, I began to entertain the idea of outsourcing fulfillment for my online store. My store had reached the point where the amount of sales were starting to take us away from our other duties here at Stupid Cancer. This milestone was a few years in the making, and we couldn’t be more excited to cease the picking and packing we had come to know.
Another huge issue we faced, though, was scalability. Stupid Cancer is located in Lower Manhattan, and the idea of warehousing inventory in our tiny digs was becoming less and less attractive. We were simply out of space.
After eTail West 2014, I had connected with several third party logistics providers (3PLs — also known as fulfillment companies) in the exhibit hall and put out an RFP for my business. The RFP included my sales stats, number of SKUs and other granular details which yielded several different quotes.
