Pick and Pack Fulfilment Service
Efficient, accurate and on-time pick and pack solutions for seamless eCommerce order fulfilment.
Grow your online business with us. Contact us today to find out more.
Grow your online business with us. Contact us today to find out more.
Efficient, accurate and on-time pick and pack solutions for seamless eCommerce order fulfilment.
Pick and pack fulfilment is the process of picking, packing and sending orders placed on your eCommerce store to the customer. When a customer places an order on your eCommerce platform, the information is automatically sent through to our pick and pack fulfilment team.
They will then look at our warehouse management system to find out where the product is stored, similar to how you pick up furniture at Ikea, and then pick all the products in the order and take them to the packing station. At the packing station, each item in the order is scanned out and carefully packed away. A shipping label is printed, added to the package, and placed into the correct courier cage, ready to be collected.
Our pick and pack process has been carefully honed and optimised over our 8 years of business. Our bread and butter are fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG), including food, beverages, beauty products, pet accessories, toys & games. However, we can serve a wide range of businesses and are always happy to see how we can accommodate you. Over time we have expanded into trade/B2B order fulfilment, delivering large-scale orders to retailers such as John Lewis, Superdrug and Lakeland.
Our pick and pack teams use a wide range of technologies to make our pick and pack process speedy and accurate. Our team is equipped with handheld PDA scanners; each station includes a built-in scale. This allows each item in the order to be scanned out of the warehouse and the final package weighed to ensure 100% accuracy every time. Should anything ever go wrong, we cover the cost of returns and shipping out the correct item.
Pick and pack accuracy can make or break your outsourced fulfilment strategy. If customers have been waiting patiently for an order to arrive, only to find the wrong item has been sent can cause a huge amount of frustration. We’ve ensured our processes reduce the chance of mistakes happening by introducing technology such as handheld scanners, barcoded products and weighing stations.
This allows us to be confident in our picking accuracy policy, which means that we are committed to ensuring all orders are correctly picked, packed and fulfilled a 100% accuracy policy. Furthermore, if things do go wrong, we take full responsibility and cover the cost of returning the item and replacement shipping.
At Whitehouse, we have multiple warehouses across Essex and Suffolk, including Earls Colne, Sudbury and Halstead. Our multiple warehouses allow us to make efficient use of all the space we have available and allow us to allocate products to specific warehouses based on the capacity of both the warehouse and the pick-and-pack teams. This ensures that all the businesses we support with pick and pack fulfilment can expect the same level of service and dispatch speed.
Another benefit is that our warehouses are close to major transport hubs such as the A14, A12, the Port of Felixstowe, and London Stansted Airport, making getting your goods to our pick-and-pack teams quick and easy. We also offer shipping container collection from various ports across the East of England through a strong partnership with our container haulage partner, helping to manage your supply chain.
We can provide a range of basic, high-quality packing products, including boxes, padded envelopes, bubble wrap and more. At Whitehouse, we firmly believe in sustainability and reducing our environmental impact; as part of this, our basic packaging products contain recycled materials. You can also provide us with your own customised, branded packaging, which we can use when packing your orders.
Once your product has been picked and packed, it’s ready to be shipped. The order management system captures this information when the order is placed, and our pick and pack team will then print and apply the label. We offer a range of shipping options from super speedy next-day delivery to cheaper economy services, great as a free shipping option. We’ll agree on a cut-off point for same-day despatch on orders according to products, volumes available and couriers used. Any orders we receive before this point are guaranteed to be dispatched on the same day.
Another benefit of using our pick and pack fulfilment service is that couriers offer us discounts due to the large number of packages we send daily, which helps offset the cost of pick and pack. Our prices are completely transparent and can be viewed within your dashboard’s accounting tab. All materials, courier service costs and picking fees are broken down in the overview section.
The order management system is the magic behind our pick and pack fulfilment service. This system sends us new orders and returns from your eCommerce platform, and in turn, the system updates your platform with postage tracking codes, your stock levels in our warehouse and the current costs accrued; all materials, courier service costs and picking fees are broken down in the overview section. The management systems integrates with a wide range of platforms, including Amazon, eBay, Shopify, WooCommerce, Magento and more.
Returns are a part of life as an eCommerce business, because of this we’ve ensured that our return process is as polished as our dispatch process. When a customer initiates a return through your eCommerce platform, an update is sent to our pick and pack teams, and we await the returned item. Once the item arrives, it will be inspected and processed in accordance with your instructions, which can be customised for each return. Find out more about our highly customisable returns process.
We offer a range of value-added extras which can be bolted onto our pick-and-pack fulfilment service. Every order we dispatch contains a packing slip, which we can fully customise with the brand logo, address, return details, and anything else you would like the customer to know. Our in-house picking team can create these or use an existing packing slip. We’ll even tailor the slips, and promotional messages, according to the marketplaces you sell in.
Our full range of value-added extras includes:
To ensure every order is picked and packed correctly, we scan each item you send us into our warehouse and then as they leave as part of customer orders, they’re scanned out. This gives you granular detail on how much stock is in the warehouse at any given time, broken down by SKU. The system will also alert you when stock levels are running low so you can send us the next batch. This allows you to be agile in the amount of stock we hold at any given time, and you can scale up and down throughout the seasons.
Long contracts with lock-in periods don’t benefit anyone. You don’t want to be tied into a long-term agreement only to discover that your provider doesn’t offer the level of service you require.
At Whitehouse, we work on a rolling contract basis with no minimum order volumes, no set-up fees and our services are pay-as-you-go, so if you’re unsure whether outsourced order fulfilment is for you, now is the time to find out. You can take a look at our blog post exploring the topic of outsourcing order fulfilment further.
Once you’ve chosen Whitehouse Solutions as your fulfilment provider, you can start to send your goods to one of our warehouses. Your account manager will be in touch to tell you exactly where to ship your items and what to expect.
Once your products arrive at our warehouse, we will barcode and scan each product as it enters the warehouse. Your products will now be ready to ship when orders come in.
As an order comes in, a pick and pack team member will find your products in our warehouse, scan them out and pack them. Once the items are packed, the final package is weighed, and a shipping label is applied. It’s then placed in the appropriate cage, ready to be collected by the delivery provider.
As your business grows and order volumes pick up, it can be time-consuming to fulfil each order yourself, not to mention finding space to hold all of your stock, and this is where outsourcing your pick and pack fulfilment starts to make sense.
By outsourcing your pick and pack fulfilment, you can spend more time working on your business and growing your order volume further while having experts taking care of storing your products and getting them sent to customers on time.
Outsourcing your pick and pack fulfilment isn’t as expensive as you might think. We charge a small fee to store your items in our warehouse, picking each item within the order, the packing materials used and the shipping cost. Each of these costs is broken down in our order management system, so you always have complete visibility of the costs. Some of these costs, such as packaging and shipping, will be less than you would typically pay on the high street as we are able to order packaging in bulk, and our shipping providers give us preferential rates due to our large volumes.
Depending on the products you sell, your supplier and order volumes, you may also save on your product costs as you can now order in far larger quantities, benefiting from reduced rates.
Pick and pack order fulfilment is used interchangeably with order fulfilment. Our warehouse team will pick the items your customer has ordered, package them together and send them out.
We have many years of experience dealing with seasonal businesses. From garden furniture businesses that have their busy periods over the summer to the surge of orders on Black Friday and the Christmas period, we can handle your pick and pack fulfilment requirements.
Yes, we offer a full-service fulfilment service which means that we pick, pack and send your orders out for you and if there is a customer return we can receive it back into our warehouse. For more information take a look at our returns management service.
Yes, we have an integration from your Amazon shop directly to our order management system so we can easily process your Amazon orders without any manual input. Depending on your seller performance you can also offer Prime shipping.
Unfortunately, we are not currently a licenced premises, so cannot handle or distribute alcoholic products.
Yes, there is a section dedicated to this within the portal as we understand that sometimes it’s easier to manage a complicated order on a customer’s behalf.
You can cancel your order free of charge up until the order is picked, ready for packing. After the order has been picked (and packed) you can still cancel the order however you will be charged the picking fee.
This can be customised within the order management system. If you allow customers to backorder products when they’re not in stock then we will dispatch them on a first-come, first-served basis as your products arrive at our warehouse. You can also set the system up to split orders so that the products that are already in stock can be dispatched, with the out of stock items being dispatched as soon as they’re restocked.
Contact us today and one of our expert team will be on hand to answer your queries.
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