The digital era has empowered people around the world to be self-reliant and self-sufficient. Similarly, with the rise of ecommerce, the nutrition and wellness industry is also ready to aim high as consumers are taking their health into their own hands.

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The McKinsey report estimates that the global wellness market has reached over $1.5 trillion. Moreover, customers spend the most money on products and services that promote better health.

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However, in the quest to meet the dietary requirements and obtain optimum health— the stakes are high.

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While nutrition and wellness brands are stringent about adhering to quality products backed by research and clinical studies, any mishap or error in fulfilment and delivery can lead to terrible consequences that can harm consumers. That's why this industry is regulated by official bodies to ensure customers' safety.

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It's crucial for nutrition and wellness brands to adopt a strategy to prioritise the safety of their customers when the products are manufactured and ready to be stored in ecommerce warehouses and shipped to the customers. Thus, these brands require a supply chain that adheres to strict guidelines and policies throughout the order fulfilment process.

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In this blog, you will learn what does fulfilment for nutrition and wellness product entail, what are the challenges of fulfilling nutrition and wellness products, how a 3PL can help in this type of fulfilment, and which brands have aced fulfilment of nutrition and wellness products with Eshopbox.

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What is nutrition and wellness fulfilment?

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Nutrition and wellness fulfilment refers to the process of picking, packing, and shipping of nutrition and wellness products, such as herbal supplements, dietary supplements, protein powders, protein shakes, energy drinks, and more.

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These products need extra attention when it comes to inventory storage and shipping them safely to customer locations.

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What are the challenges of fulfiling nutrition and wellness products?

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Fulfilment of nutrition and wellness products comes with more challenges than other products like apparel, jewellery, gadgets, and more. Let’s have a look at them.

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1. FDA-approved warehouse

Since nutrition and wellness products have a limited shelf life and need extra attention to safety measures, they must be approved by the FDA (Food and Drug Administration, India). You need an FDA-certified warehouse to store your inventory and process online orders if your ecommerce brand sells nutrition and wellness products.

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2. Expiration hassles and batch tracking

Nutrition and wellness products have expiration dates, unlike other products. This means you have to keep up with your product's expiration dates to ensure an expired product doesn't reach your customer's doorstep.

However, as you deal with many products and their expiration dates, keeping track of them during fulfilment can be challenging. Moreover, in the event of a product recall, you need seamless batch tracking to track products throughout the supply chain. It can be even more difficult if you're fulfiling orders in-house and using multiple vendors and service providers.

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3. The need for special packaging

Nutrition and wellness products usually require special packaging due to their temperature sensitivity and fragility. Hence, they are often considered fragile fulfilment. So, it’s essential that your packaging is optimised for product quality and security. Moreover, packaging determines almost everything, from shipping costs and unboxing experience to in-transit damage. Thus, making packaging a crucial element in order fulfilment.

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How a 3PL provider can help in the fulfilment of nutrition & wellness products?

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When it comes to logistics and fulfilment processes, 3PL (Third-Party Logistics) providers often provide all the services that ecommerce brands need. Similarly, a 3PL partner like Eshopbox provides ideal fulfilment solutions for nutrition and wellness brands.

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1. Superior quality control and inventory management

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In industries like nutrition and wellness, the regulatory bodies have extremely rigid guidelines that you must follow with regard to storage, distribution and fulfilment. With Eshopbox’s superior quality control and batch tracking, you can stay on top of compliance by tracking and recording end-to-end supply and distribution.

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2. Management of exception scenarios like product recalls

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A product recall is a request that commands a manufacturer or a brand to retrieve a product or the entire batch after finding safety issues or defects. These issues can endanger the consumer and put the manufacturer or the brand at risk of legal action.

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In such cases of product recalls, you are required to act quickly. With Eshopbox, you can trace which products are recalled to determine where they were produced, are currently stored, or if they are shipped to customers. This will help you immediately remove faulty batches from your fulfilment centres and supply chain.

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3. Order fulfilment at batch level

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Some of the common inventory methods are FIFO (First In First Out), LIFO (Last In First Out), and FEFO (First Expired First Out). So, if you're selling nutrition and wellness products with expiry dates and need batch tracking, Eshopbox will use the FEFO method in which the product with the closest expiry date moves out first.

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For instance, you sell nutrition tablets online. Your inventory comprises of three batches based on the expiry date of the products:

Batch A: Expiry date is January, 2026

Batch B: Expiry date is July, 2026

Batch C: Expiry date is November, 2025

In this scenario, Eshopbox will ship out Batch C first when an order is received.

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4. Express delivery across India

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48% of customers say that their online orders are delivered within 2-3 days. This means shipping standards are very high these days. Fortunately, if you outsource your order fulfilment to Eshopbox, 100% of your customers will be eligible for express shipping. This is possible because of Eshopbox's distributed network of fulfilment centres that are located across India, facilitating inventory splitting.

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5. A great unboxing experience

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When it comes to purchasing nutrition and wellness products online, an unboxing experience is part of the product that customers buy. Eshopbox can help you maintain superior brand quality with custom packaging.

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Instead of just using protective packaging to safeguard fragile nutrition and wellness products, you can set flexible packaging rules. These include using distinctive packaging materials for different products and adding inserts such as samples, gift cards, coupons, and pamphlets.

Additionally, you can incorporate special instructions for using bubble wrap for fragile merchandise and generate custom labels like 'fragile' and 'priority shipping'.

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6. Subscription box management

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‍‍One of the great things about nutrition and wellness subscriptions is that it helps people stay on top of their health routine. On the other hand, subscription orders are an excellent idea for ecommerce brands that get customers to convert, lock in recurring revenue and increase customer lifetime value (CLTV). While customers can schedule their orders on a weekly, monthly, or quarterly basis, Eshopbox can help you ensure automatic and efficient fulfilment of subscription boxes.

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As a result, you don't have to worry about timely shipping as per the predetermined schedules of customers, as Eshopbox takes care of that. Moreover, you can offer product kits to your customers in subscription boxes while maintaining incredible order accuracy with customised packaging options.

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Who have aced their fulfilment for nutrition wellness products with Eshopbox?

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Across the world, nutrition and wellness businesses have seen a tremendous impact on their growth by partnering with a 3PL. From special attention to safety measures, quality control, and lightning-fast shipping to delivering memorable unboxing experiences, with Eshopbox scaling your business has never been easier.

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1. Plixlife

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Committed to offering clean, sustainable and innovative solutions, Plixlife discovered the great potential in offering soy-free, gluten-free nutrition for its customer base in India. Plixlife has now slowly expanded its product portfolio with superfoods, immunity boosters and natural beauty supplements all in the mix.

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Now, 100% of Plixlife’s products have an Amazon Prime badge. The brand also maintains 99.5% order fulfilment accuracy with 15 days of inventory turnaround.

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“Working with Eshopbox allowed us to get the Amazon Prime badge on all our product listings, this helped us boost product visibility and sales on Amazon. We also have the flexibility to sell on other marketplaces without exclusively committing inventory to Amazon warehouses.”

-Rishubh Satiya, Cofounder Plixlife

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2. Vitamin Planet

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Being the most vastly and rapidly expanding Sports Supplements company in India, Vitamin Planet strived to offer genuine sports nutrition supplements to health enthusiasts across the country. Today, Vitamin Planet has a wide range of genuine health products across categories and all major brands.

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“With our inventory stored in Eshopbox fulfilment centres, the same inventory could be used across Amazon, Flipkart and our brand website. We also got the seller badges like Amazon Prime and Flipkart Assured without storing inventory in their warehouses. This has helped us witness a 45% increase in sell-through across sales channels.”

-Himanshu Rane, Ecommerce manager, Vitamin Planet

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3. Bold Care

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Being a trusted men's health brand, Bold Care is all about the Indian man rediscovering the confidence he needs to feel complete. Experts and scientific bodies back Bold Care’s solutions and products, and all their treatments are full of holistic goodness.

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“We were amazed at how quickly we started selling, the onboarding was simple and seamless. Eshopbox's fast fulfilment services allowed us to mark our Flipkart listings for express deliveries; this helped us increase our Flipkart sales.”

-Mayank Singh, Ecommerce Head, Boldcare

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Bottom line

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The competition in the nutrition and wellness industry is cut-throat, but the potential for growth is also limitless. To scale your ecommerce business in this industry, you require expertise, infrastructure and a strategic approach. Partnering up with a 3PL provider can help you attain long-term growth with seamless order fulfilment.