Ecommerce fulfilment is the trickiest part of selling online as it is your first touchpoint with your customers. This first impression can either make or break your business. In order to delight your customers, you must offer speedy order delivery. However, this can cut deep into your profit if you don't implement the right strategy.

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Multi-warehousing is a key strategic move your ecommerce brand can adopt to provide fast ecommerce fulfilment and save on costs while staying at par.

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In this blog, you'll learn what is inventory splitting (also known as multi-warehousing), and what are the advantages of splitting inventory for an ecommerce brand in ecommerce fulfilment.

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What is inventory splitting?

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Distribution of inventory across multiple ecommerce warehouses or Fulfilment Centres (FCs) to keep it closer to your customers is known as inventory splitting. It helps you to reduce the order transit time and save on the ecommerce shipping costs.

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What are the advantages of splitting inventory in multiple fulfilment warehouses?

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Using multiple ecommerce fulfilment warehouses you can:

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1. Minimise risk in case of emergencies

It's better to be safe than sorry for delaying your orders! In case of a catastrophic event such as a natural calamity, splitting inventory allows you to minimise losses, restricting it to the affected ecommerce fulfilment warehouses. So even if some of your merchandise is compromised, you will always have multiple back-ups available.

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2. Drive down ecommerce shipping costs and deliver orders faster

It's quite often that customers exist across multiple zones, and you may receive orders from any of these zones. Let's have a look at how shipping fees varies with distance:

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While providing ecommerce shipping to customers in multiple cities from one location will attract zonal and national level shipping fees. However, with the help of distributed inventory, you will get a reliable infrastructure across your supply chain. Shipping from the ecommerce warehouse near to your customers reduces transit time enabling you to offer lightning-fast shipping. Reduced shipping distances will attract local or zonal level shipping fees and will ultimately help you reduce shipping costs significantly.

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3. Tap into newer markets

Using multiple fulfilment warehouses in India, you get the opportunity to tap into newer markets. Let's say; your inventory is available in Delhi, it is highly likely that you would have an established customer base in the north. Now, when you store your products in Bangalore, you can start building brand awareness in the south. It will help you target potential customers who are based in different regions of the country.

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4. Win Amazon buy box by enabling next-day delivery

The buy box refers to the white box that appears on the right side on the product detail page of Amazon, where customers can add items to their cart they want to purchase.

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All sellers are not eligible to win the Buy Box, due to the stiff competition and Amazon's customer-obsessed approach! Only businesses with exceptional seller metrics stand a chance to win the Buy Box.

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To understand how important prioritising the Buy Box is, consider this:

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82% of Amazon sales go through the Buy Box, and the percentage is even higher for mobile purchases.

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To increase your chances of winning the Buy Box and striking the competition, you need to understand how Amazon's algorithm functions.

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One of the potential metrics to win a buy box is next-day delivery, and this can be achieved by intelligently splitting your inventory across multiple fulfilment warehouses.

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5. Rank higher in search results of marketplaces

When a buyer searches for an item, the marketplace displays the product results as per highest to lowest ranking. This ranking algorithm decides the position in which your product will appear. One of the heaviest weighted parameters for product ranking is the speed of order delivery to the customer. So, when you distribute your inventory in multiple fulfilment warehouses, you increase your product visibility and consequently your overall sales.

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6. Earn Gold status for your Flipkart account with Regional Utilization (RU)

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Are(R) you(U) close to your customers to deliver products faster? Regional Utilization (RU) is a percentage of local and zonal shipments out of your overall shipments.

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To understand how important Regional Utilization (RU) is to become a gold seller, consider the official statement of Flipkart:

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Regional Utilisation (RU) will be a new performance parameter added to existing parameters. To become a Gold seller, your RU % must be 20% or above.

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Using multiple fulfilment warehouses to store your inventory will increase your Regional Utilization (RU) score and qualify you to be a contender for the gold status!

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7. Ship high volume of orders

When you’re serving fewer customers, one ecommerce warehouse will serve your purpose. However, as you grow and start receiving a high number of orders, you will realise that your shipping cost exceeds the cost of an additional ecommerce warehouse. At that point, it would be sensible to distribute your inventory across multiple fulfilment warehouses.

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When should you avoid splitting inventory in multiple fulfilment warehouses?

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Distributed inventory has lots of advantages. However, it may not be a good option for you if you just have one region to serve.

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While distributed inventory provides access to customers, it is important to analyse your customer base. So if you plan to sell fashion accessories in Mumbai, it wouldn’t make sense to invest in multiple ecommerce warehouses when your customers are located in a specific area in Maharashtra.

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With a fulfilment warehouse near your customers, you don't need to expand outward. By analysing your past order history, you will able to identify high sales zones. Typically, your product to orders will have a 20:80 ratio, this means that 20% of your products will contribute to 80% of your orders. If that's the case, you can continue serving high-sale zones using a single fulfilment warehouse.

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How to plan inventory splitting in multiple fulfilment warehouses?

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Effectively distributing your inventory is tricky, and various factors need to be considered. Now, let's have a look at the methods to strategically plan and distribute your inventory in multiple fulfilment warehouses.

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Analyse the most demanding zone

‍With the help of your past order history, analyse the region where orders are maximum. It helps you plan your inventory distribution according to high sales zones.

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Identify heavy-weight products

‍Look for the products having more weight and distribute them to different fulfilment warehouses.

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Identify high-selling SKUs

Identify products that have a high sell-through rate. If you are starting fresh and don't have sales data to identify top performers, then distribute inventory of your flagship products.

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Deep dive into seller panels

Marketplaces like Amazon and Flipkart have seller panels which can provide you with performance reports. You can analyse these reports to identify the most prominent zones to store your inventory.

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Leverage Eshopbox to split inventory and optimise costs

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Get actionable dashboard and data-driven analytics

‍Eshopbox's technology platform allows you to plan your ideal inventory distribution. Using your historical order data, you can:

• View which fulfilment centres shipped your orders for a specified time period and the total shipping costs you incurred.
• Visualise your customers' delivery locations for a better interpretation of distributing your inventory across Eshopbox's fulfilment centres.

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Strong tie-up with national carriers, with reasonable shipping rates

‍Eshopbox handles high order volumes and has strong tie-ups with domestic couriers. Working with Eshopbox lets you avail services with national carriers at substantially discounted shipping rates.

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Bottom line

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Inventory splitting in multiple fulfilment warehouses is one of the best ways to stay competitive in the ecommerce space. An experienced ecommerce fulfilment company in India like Eshopbox, not only will enable you to store your inventory in multiple fulfilment centres (FCs) across India, but also help you plan strategic inventory allocation and gain strategic geographic footprint.