After marketing and sales - order fulfillment

Does your online business involves physical product? If so, your business will be more complicated than if it involves digital products like eBooks etc. The very first step of course is marketing which would be same for both. However, once you receive an order, the difference become apparent, for orders will have to be followed by fulfillment of the order. For both, you must have an inventory. The inventory for a digital product would be just a digital file or files stored online somewhere in a server ready for download. The same digital file or files can be downloaded countless number of times and you will never run out of stock.

For physical product, keeping inventory will be a major headache for you may have to have a warehouse to store the inventory and a system to manage the inventory and a system and staff for order fulfillment (also known as product fulfillment).

If you are prepared to pay, you can pass these headaches to a third party fulfillment services company while you concentrate on the more important marketing and sales. Third party fulfillment services companies, because they are specialised in this area, will be able to take care of order fulfillment very much more efficiently than you can ever hope to be as they can put in place infrastructures and staff to handle the tasks and they can spread the costs of such infrastructures and staff over lots more products which you cannot because you may only have one or a few products and will not be able to justify the cost