When you're starting your company you want to keep your overheads as low as possible. You also want to start selling your product in a realistic framework, where you don't have to worry about maintaining your own inventory and staff. As your orders climb you may start to think about running your own warehouse " though by that time, your experiences with a fulfilment services provider may have been so beneficial that you just stick with what you know!

Ultimately a fulfilment services partner makes sense for multiple reasons. As a startup company, you can benefit from your fulfilment partner's access to the best systems, the best knowledge and the best hardware. As your company grows, you can take advantage of the effectively limitless warehousing space your partner company can give you.

Let's say you are starting your company on the back of a specific product you've designed, or to display and sell a range of items you have targeted a market for. This is where the range of your true expertise is " in identifying markets and developing products to sell.

Ask yourself this question: how much do you really know about the logistics or order fulfilment?

The histories of established companies are littered with phrases like "we had to learn as we went along". Which is all very well if you're now an established company, but for every one that made it through to be a household/well known name there are hundreds that fell by the wayside. Why? Not because their products were poor or their marketing suspect. It was a lack of expertise in order fulfilment services that did for them.

Supply chain is in one sense the most essential part of your business. And it's also the part you are least likely to have any experience of. As a start up company you have so much to learn about already " marketing your new product, getting exposure " that you certainly don't need the problem of having to learn how to do supply chain fulfilment as well.

So what you do instead is partner up with a company whose whole area of expertise is supply chain " the provision and refinement of fulfilment services. You'd be amazed at just how much help a fulfilment services company can give you. In addition to the streamlined delivery and tracking of your orders, your fulfilment partner is able to help with catalogue mailings and literature mail outs " and to develop reactive delivery solutions to complex or unusual problems.

In the modern business world, outsourcing is the way to success. You do what you do best, and you hire the services " in this instance the fulfilment services " of others who do their own thing best, as you need them. It's not just about the experienced benefits either. Your fulfilment services partner hires you its state of the art equipment (which it pays to maintain) and orders processing network as well.