/PREPARING to build your ONLINE STORE

Getting products to your customers

Now let's think about what happens after  a sale has been made through your store. How are going to get the product from your  hands into your customer's hands? This process is called fulfillment.

Fulfillment might sound complicated, but at its core, it's just three parts:

Part 1

Storing your products

Part 2

Packaging your products

Part 3

Delivering your products

While the platform does have a way to support your inventory management (so you can track what you do and don't have in stock), your storage and packaging decisions don't have much of an impact on the process of building your store. The part we need to think about now is that delivery component. Specifically:

How will your customers receive the items they've purchased from you?

When you're selling physical goods, there are 3 options to consider here:

Option 1

Ship purchased items from your store to your customer.

Option 2

Have customers pick up their purchase in your store.

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Option 3

You can offer a combination of shipping and in-store pickup.

The method you choose will have configuration implications for your store.

If you're shipping items

You'll want to think about:

How will you manage shipping logistics online?

Similar to your options for tax calculations, you can either:

  • Manually manage shipping in the platform by creating zones and assigning rates

          or

  • Use Easyship to automate shipping calculations for you

We will have a whole course on configuring shipping coming soon. In the meantime, use the following to learn more about each of these options:

To manage shipping manually, you'll create shipping zones so you can control how shipping is calculated. Rates for each of these zones can be set independently so your customers in those regions are charged the appropriate amount for shipping.