The process of picking, packaging, and listing groups of items under one product number is called kitting. It’s a common practice in online retail sales, as offering bundles of the same or related items can help customers feel as if they’re getting a deal, enticing them to buy more.
But handling the kitting process yourself can be time-consuming and frustrating, leading you to consider outsourcing your kitting process to a third-party logistics company.
Here are 5 reasons to consider outsourcing your kitting, making your business stronger and more efficient:
Lower Labor Costs
It takes time and training for employees to be proficient at properly kitting your products. This can cause your labor costs to skyrocket, virtually eliminating any benefits you get for selling products grouped together.
By outsourcing to a 3PL, someone else handles the hiring, training, and overall management of the employees doing the kitting.
You don’t have to worry about finding extra people to cover your kitting during your busy season, or making sure you have trained employees ready to take over in the event that someone calls in sick. Everything is left up to the 3PL, and all you have to worry about is getting your fully kitted products back and ready for sale.
Space Savings
Kitting products requires more space than you’d need if you didn’t repackage your products.
Individual products must be picked off the shelves and, depending on the situation, unpackaged to be grouped into bundles. This could require you to have a handful of different products off the shelves awaiting kitting at any given time, meaning you need a lot of extra floor or table space.
Then, once the bundles are made, you need to have the space to store the fully kitted packages prior to their sale.
When you outsource, you don’t have to worry about finding space in your facility for all this to happen. Someone else has to manage the logistics of kitting your products, keeping your space requirements much lower than if you handled kitting on your own.
Scalability
Sometimes, your business needs a lot of kitting help. At other times, you don’t need much.
If you handle your own kitting all the time, you are responsible for ensuring that you’ve got the staff to take care of the busy times, while making sure you’re not keeping too many people on the schedule when things are slower. And, if you have an unexpected uptick in demand for your kitted products, that can mean a major scramble to find and train enough people to keep up with demand.
Partnering with a 3PL, on the other hand, gives you all the flexibility you need to respond to ebbing and flowing demand without any of the stress.
Your 3PL dials up your service level to meet increased demand, and can easily pull that service back as your demand dips. This allows you to continue to provide the same level of service regardless of demand, making your customers happier in the process.
Better Customer Service
Your customers want the right product, on time, every time. As a small operation handling everything yourself, this can be difficult as you spread yourself and your staff very thin.
Whether this means you send orders out that are full of mistakes or you let your responsiveness to customer requests slide in order to accurately fulfill orders, an inability to provide a solid level of customer service at any time can cause you to lose business from current customers and may dissuade potential customers from purchasing.
By outsourcing, you get to provide all those kitted products to your customers on time without causing your responsiveness to customer requests and demands to slide.
This allows you to maintain a higher level of customer service, leading to more repeat and new customers and helping your business grow.
Increased Focus
No matter how hard you try, you can’t possibly offer a high level of competency for every single task that comes with your business.
You may be great at developing and marketing products, and responding to customer requests, but your ability to manage picking, packing, and shipping orders isn’t so great. That’s OK! No one is great at everything, and part of owning a business is realizing where you need to ask for help so you can give your customers the experience they deserve.
Working with a 3PL for those tasks you may not be so great at, such as kitting, allows your time and attention to be freed up to focus on the things you are great at.
In the long run, this ability to focus on your core competencies and to, in turn, partner with people who are good at the things you’re bad at, will strengthen your business and help it grow faster.
Skilled Kitting Services on the East Coast
If you offer products that need to be picked, packaged, and listed under a single product code, don’t spend your time dealing with this task! At Cannon Hill Logistics, our team is experienced at kitting from end to end, offering you experienced, detail-oriented services that help your business reach its potential. Call today for an individualized quote so we can meet your business’ needs!