Logistics

The market of companies offering logistics services has developed and offers quite favorable conditions. There are companies that specialize in the delivery of flowers, products and other goods that require special documents or provide the necessary conditions for transportation.

Outsourcing of these works is also economically justified if the volume of your orders does not exceed 200 per day for one region. At the same time, if you offer urgent delivery of 1-12 hours, then only you can provide it yourself.

When outsourcing, it is enough to make a check delivery of the order once a month to evaluate the work of your contractor and make selective calls to customers by the customer care service.

Product storage and order layout

Most small stores tend to get rid of their own inventory accounting and order layout, especially when their volumes are small. Many services offer to take over the entire cycle of working with the product, most of them reviews are quite good.

Economically, at a certain volume, it may be profitable, but the benefits are significantly outweighed by the disadvantages, and there are too many of them:

• You and your employees do not have contact with the product, and therefore only have information about it that is contained on the site. Consultants and PR services can't tell you anything about it.
• Order refunds are a bottleneck in these services. When returning the product, you must carefully check, because there are both substitutions on the part of couriers, and dishonesty of buyers. The contractor is not interested in this.
• You can not influence the appearance in which the product falls into the hands of the buyer, and therefore, beautiful packaging, or Vice versa, the most nondescript, if we are talking about a gift, can not be provided by you.
• You will not be able to complete the order with handouts or bonuses to customers.

Shipment from suppliers

One of our clients in the entire territory of the Russian Federation, has solved the problem as follows: he kept a small warehouse, and every working day in the morning, his van shipped goods from suppliers that had been made the day before. I used them literally on the move in the warehouse accounting, completed orders directly in the van (I took some of the goods from the warehouse in the morning), and passed them to the courier service. If there were urgent orders, I delivered them to clients.

Accounting

Like delivery, the market for these services is already established, and servicing a small store will cost you much less than maintaining your own employee.

Procurement management

Even if you ship by piece and try to create purchases for specific orders, you still need to take into account the seasonality or track the remainder of popular items in the supplier's warehouse. In any case, for the successful development of your project, you need to build partnerships with representatives of supplier companies. Therefore, if you have any thoughts of outsourcing these services, it is better to immediately consider the role of the investor, as a result, this will be a more cost-effective step for you.

Order processing

Some time ago, there was a boom in outsourcing call centers, but now most companies solve this problem in the following way.

Routine notifications are transferred to SMS or messengers. Incoming calls are distributed via IVR, and only a part of them goes to the operators (of course, it depends on the specifics of your online store). The operator's task is not only to be a live representative of your company, but also to collect feedback from the client. Only this way will set you the right direction in the development of your project.

Outsourcing a call center entails the following disadvantages:

• The lack of feedback from customers
• The client does not have the ability to quickly contact an employee who can solve their problem
• There is no possibility to make an additional sale or provide a better service (unfortunately, as practice shows, scripts help very little here)

Sales management

The development of a market entry strategy and its implementation should be based on data, but you simply won't have it if you outsource these tasks. This scheme will not work even if you use the KPI, because you also need to understand the current picture in order to generate it correctly.

• CRM marketing should be done independently, if necessary, involving third-party consultants.
• Conducting advertising campaigns - it is better to give them to agencies that specialize in them.
• SMM is an internal task of the company, in fact related to PR, it can not be outsourced, because no contractor can represent your company.
• SEO - these works, as well as the management of the ROK, can be safely outsourced to the Agency, having determined the KPI you need/
• The advice is the same - if you are not ready to deal with these tasks - consider your role as an investor.

Management decision

If you realize that you are not able to achieve the efficiency you need and there is a desire to attract a third-party specialist, it is better to hire him on the staff. No company will dive into your project the way a full-time employee can. Yes, the cost of hiring him will be burdensome, or you will have to share some of the profits, but this is the only way for the project.

Conclusion

As you can see, you can outsource local tasks. If the tasks are linked in the process, then you need to be able to control the intermediate result. All tasks related to communication with your client (except delivery) can not be trusted to third-party companies, no matter how well their business is debugged. You lose touch with the customer and are not flexible, which gives your competitors an advantage.

There are proposals even from major players to provide almost a full cycle of the offline part of the IM business: warehousing, formation, logistics. At quite attractive prices. For some, this may be a good solution, but it will also be a significant limitation.

More than once in this article, I have called for a review of my role in the project for the following reasons:

My firm belief is that any project needs to be developed

• Process control
• Feedback from end users
• Getting up-to-date information
• If your process does not meet these conditions, your project will not be successful. But if you want to earn money, you can participate in it or in a third-party project as an investor. This will be both less risky and more effective.

The myth of an online store as a "small candle factory” has already been destroyed. Technology development requires constant investment, and competition in all markets is only increasing. Therefore, this is a business for those who are ready to act actively and constantly develop.