Ten years can sometimes fly by. Yet a lot can happen in those ten years, too. What was barely imaginable back then is commonplace today – and vice versa. When bergler industrieservices GmbH turned its attention to e-commerce fulfillment in 2009, the world of online retail still looked quite different, both for sellers and for customers online. This year, we're celebrating our 10th fulfillment anniversary – at least in the e-commerce sector.
From the analog to the digital world of fulfillment
Fulfillment itself is nothing new for our team under managing director Raimund Bergler: "We've had this topic on our radar for many years. In the past, we carried out packaging work for industry. So it made sense to also offer the service of packaging shipping parcels. Unfortunately, we were a few years ahead of our time."
Back then, the world of e-commerce in Germany was in fact dominated by one major player: eBay, along with its power sellers. Here, as with other, smaller shop providers too, trust in external service providers was not very high. Above all, these power sellers could hardly imagine handing their goods over to be packaged and shipped by external service providers, says Bergler.
The state of technology was also quite different: creating interfaces to individual shop systems wasn't yet as common as it is today. That's also why things stayed at the stage of first tentative attempts." The real breakthrough only came a few years later.
We still remember our very first e-commerce fulfillment customer well. It was an online shop for energy-saving lamps, whose operator was also based in Gelnhausen. For this, we programmed an integration with the PlentyMarkets shop system as well as the first modules in our ERP system. Even back then, we also implemented the first connections to parcel services. This formed the basis for the now very extensive system we have today. "The process basically worked very well, and we learned quickly," Bergler recalls, "but unfortunately the shop couldn't hold its own on the market for very long."
The rules of the game are changing
Over time, the requirements of online customers have changed significantly. They not only expect to be able to buy almost anything online, but also place great value on extremely high flexibility in logistics. Any online retailer who wants to keep their customers happy has to adapt storage and shipping entirely to customer needs. For shops with brick-and-mortar branches, the topic of omnichannel is also becoming increasingly important, as customers are more and more often active across all channels: ordering online, picking up in-store, returning items to the retailer if needed, and receiving exchange goods back by post … the more flexibly this is handled in packaging, shipping, and returns management, the more positively this stands out amid the ever-growing competition.
This is also evident when looking abroad: "Exports in particular are constantly growing and are no longer limited to the EU. This means not only that shops need to be able to deliver internationally, but the fulfillment service provider must also be able to reflect that, and very quickly," says Bergler, describing the current situation.
Performance is generally an important factor, and advantages like Amazon Prime raise the bar even higher for online retailers. In short: the online customer is spoiled. There is now a basic expectation that parcels will be delivered the very next day. This is hardly something that can be realized efficiently in-house, let alone cost-effectively, if a shop operator wants to remain independent from the billion-dollar trading platforms.
One thing is certain: the market environment isn't getting any easier. Yet when it comes to the future, Raimund Bergler is reluctant to commit to a firm prediction: "A forecast is really difficult. At the moment, I assume that growth rates will continue for some time, regardless of the overall economic development. Here, we benefit above all from the shift from brick-and-mortar to online retail."
For bergler industrieservices GmbH as a whole, however, he sees growing pressure to provide more and more services. And that requires staying informed about all processes and developments in the market. Because anyone who doesn't stay up to date will quickly fall behind here. According to Bergler, differentiating from the competition through logistics outsourcing also makes sense: "We try to set ourselves apart from competitors above all through production-related activities and to deliberately carve out a niche." For manufacturers, it could become much more important in the future to finish products shortly before shipping, meaning only then producing them to their final state. This would essentially have to happen "in the warehouse."
Despite all the challenges, and looking back on the past ten years, Bergler views the future of fulfillment positively: "We want to continue growing and steadily expand our range of services. In doing so, we always try to question what our customer needs and what we need to do to make our customers even more successful."
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