The main benefit of outsourcing your order fulfillment is that it frees up time and resources. Packaging orders, tracking inventory, and dealing with returns can be handled off-site by a group of experts.

Many companies are finding outsourcing ecommerce fulfillment favorable so that they can focus on their core business of selling products.

There are various vendors out there that offer various types of deals with regards to shipping. The question that you need to be asking yourself is how fast do I want to ship my item, where do I want to ship this item and how big is this item ? Answering these questions allows you to better determine the best shipping option. Generally, the best option to ship small letters would be the post office (USPS). However, when it comes to shipping packages, there are various vendors with different offerings. Many of these vendors offer international shipments as well as three-day, two-day, and next day shipments.

Benefits for small and medium businesses include:

-          Being able to send your items to your customers so you do not have to maintain a brick and mortar store. This means that you can cut down on your expenses making your business more competitive.

-          Being able to send your shipments to customers all over the globe which means that your market becomes global.

-          Shipping vendors offer next day shipment, and since many customers demand their items faster these days, you would still be able to offer that to them.

Some of the well known shipping vendors offer:

-          Various shipping options such as weekly ground shipment, two day shipments and next day air shipments.

-          International shipping

-          Shipping of large and very large containers locally as well as internationally (usually by sea for very large or heavy items).

To give you an idea of what it might cost to ship items, it costs $ 6 to ship a book from an address in Virginia to Indiana. And it costs $14 dollars to ship a 10 LBS laptop from Texas to Virginia.

Some vendors also offer to ship items as big as a car which usually costs around $ 1000 (ballpark) for trucking it within the US.

Benefits: no stock to worry about, no hassle of packing and shipping, no warehouse keeping and staffing cost, and lastly speedy processing

Drawbacks: Might be exposed to some risks of product quality that are been shipped to customers, difficulty to return or exchange. One should obtain all the vendor’s policies regarding these post sale services.

Let us examine some of the drop shippers in the industrial standard.

Some of the analytics services offered by vendors are

-          Social site monitoring and reporting (how much your company is mentioned on twitter, facebook, youtube, etc.)

-          Ad management

-          Lead classification and management

-          Marketing effectiveness

-          Visitor recognition

-          And much more

Most vendors have a module based pricing strategy where every different service is purchased separately. Therefore the prices vary wildly, depending on your specific needs.

Automatic website monitoring offers a wide variety of options.  There are some companies that monitor your site from servers placed around the world to make sure that all corners of the planet can access your site not just a particular country. They also can monitor a wide variety of protocols the make sure that all feature of your site is functioning not just the HTML site. The protocols include HTML, POP3 (email), FTP(file transfer), SSL(security), and many others. They also monitor the accuracy of the various DNS servers around the world and can notify you if there is a problem.

For those who are unfamiliar, DNS (Domain Name Service/Server) translates you websites domain name into the proper IP address so that people don’t have to remember a long string of numbers. For a basic example, when you type in www.google.com that will get translated to something like 192.168.1.105 (not actually Google’s IP address). Without DNS, navigating the internet would be very difficult.

Once the monitor is in place you need to choose a method of notification, in case there is a problem. This can include emails, SMS (txt message), pre-recorded phone call, and many others. Some have more customization than others but as always the more customization the higher the cost. Think about when and who needs to know about a problem with the website. The webmaster will probably need to know immediately but the Vice President doesn’t need to be woken up in the middle of the night because the site is down. Every business is different and notification needs are highly customizable to each specific need.

Pricing mostly falls into two categories. First, some sites choose an a la Carte approach where you get the basic service free or at a low cost, then as you add additional services to monitor and methods of notification the monthly costs increases. The second approach is a package based method. They have tiered levels of service options (i.e. basic, professional, premium) that includes a variety of monitoring and notification methods. This may give you services you don’t need, but with that being said this can still be cheaper in some cases than the a la carte method.

Our new edition has new revised and expanded content to enhance the success of starting your own business. Now with over 90 pages of content, learn new ways to help your online business thrive in this struggling economy.

With the launch of our new Guidebook we now reach over 60,000 small business owners and reach out to over 500 Small Business Development Centers nationally.

We hope that you enjoy our new Spring 2010 edition of the Online Business Guidebook!

To coincide with the launch of the new edition, we’re launching this blog, which we’ll update regularly with topics of interest to small business owners who want to go and grow online. We’ve also launched an online discussion forum to allow you to post questions about online business topics and receive answers from a community of experts. We’re also launching a new Wiki, where experts can contribute informative articles about e-business vendors, software, and other issues. Whether you’re a reader or a contributor, we hope you’ll become an active participant in our new online community. Stay abreast of the latest info for your e-business: subscribe to our RSS feed, follow us on twitter, or check back regularly for new updates!