Technology

Hosted eCommerce and Multiple Drop Shipping Warehouses

August 28, 2013

Small businesses often have small budgets and limited technology expertise.  After all, you are in business to sell your products and not in business to build eCommerce websites.   Hosted eCommerce providers fulfill this need.

There are many options for hosted eCommerce providers.  A hosted eCommerce solutions provide a turn key solution to sell products on the internet.  You basically show up with your product images and descriptions.  Enter the data and you are now an internet retailer.

Many eCommerce websites involve drop shipping.  Drop Shipping allows you to take an order and forward it to a drop ship vendor.  The vendor then ships the product directly to the end customer.

This sounds like a great idea, until you have more than one drop shipping warehouse or vendor.  Most of the hosted eCommerce providers do not support multiple shipping warehouses.  This is most frustrating.

Why is Multiple Warehouse support important?

Shipping costs is the reason.  If a customer buys two items.  One item is shipped from a drop shipping warehouse in New York.  The second product is shipped from a drop shipping warehouse in Texas.  These are two separate packages.  If your hosted eCommerce solution does not support multiple drop shipping warehouses, it will only charge the customer for one package shipping costs.  As a small business owner, can you afford to absorb $7 to $12 per order?  This is why this is a critical requirement.

Which Hosted eCommerce solutions support Multiple Drop Shipping Warehouses?

The list is very small.  The following solutions support Multiple Drop Shipping Warehouses:

The following products DO NOT support multiple warehouse drop shipping

  • Pinnacle Cart
  • Volusion
  • Shopify
  • Big Commerce
  • MagentGo

If you need the ability to have multiple drop shipping warehouse locations, then most of the major hosted eCommerce solutions will not work.

 

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