Lao Wang, who has been an e-commerce company for three years, has recently fallen into a dilemma. Business was good in the first two years. I rented a 500-square-meter warehouse and raised 8 people. The monthly warehousing and logistics cost was close to 70,000 yuan. However, growth has slowed down this year, and the warehouse is mostly empty. Workers are still being paid their wages when they are idle. When big promotions come, they are too busy, and there are constant complaints about missed or missed payments. He wants to close the warehouse and switch to a fulfillment warehouse for delivery, but what he is more worried about is not the cost - what if the order cannot be shipped during the migration?
Lao Wang's dilemma is the epitome of countless e-commerce sellers. In 2025, the size of China's e-commerce fulfillment warehouse market has exceeded 180 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 21.3%, while the proportion of national e-commerce self-built warehouses has fallen below 38%. Order fulfillment is becoming a mainstream contract fulfillment method, but many people have not yet got the answer to the question "how to make a smooth transition".
1. Why are more and more people giving up shipping goods by themselves? Three pain points hurt too much
Many e-commerce sellers take the same path when they start: rent a small warehouse, pack and ship the goods themselves. When the order volume is stable, book expenses are controllable and there seems to be no problem. But once orders fluctuate—daily live broadcast sales pulse, sales peaks surge 10 times, and peak season differences increase to more than 5 times—the structural shortcomings of self-built warehouses are exposed.
Pain point one: Wrong and missed shots cannot be prevented. Full manual sorting, manual review, no rigid verification mechanism. The error rate is usually between 1% and 3% due to size mismatch, mixed categories, and missing gifts. If an order is shipped incorrectly, the after-sales cost will be combined with the store's score to drop, and the traffic will also drop.
Pain point two: Inventory never matches. There is no grid management of partitioned warehouse locations, goods are stacked in disorder, and front-end salable inventory and offline physical inventory data are separated. Oversold scenarios occur frequently - users place an order, but the warehouse has no goods to deliver.
Pain point three: Manpower and energy are consumed at both ends. During off-peak periods, staff are idle and fixed expenditures are incurred. During peak periods, temporary recruitment and training cannot keep up, and the operating procedures are unfamiliar. The boss not only has to manage operations and delivery, but also pays attention to warehouse inventory, express delivery reconciliation, and personnel scheduling. His core energy is heavily occupied by back-end trivial matters.
When these three pain points are superimposed, warehousing changes from "back-end support" to "front-end drag". A survey shows that 82% of companies only include rent, wages, water and electricity when calculating self-construction costs, and less than 15% include system iterations, management efforts, labor premiums for major promotions, and after-sales costs. If these items are undercounted, the book cost may be more than 25% lower than the actual cost.
2. Are you afraid of interruption in migration? Three-step strategy to keep your shipments going
"Will changing from a self-built warehouse to a fulfillment warehouse affect delivery?" This is a question that sellers ask more. The answer is: as long as the method is correct, it is completely possible to ensure continuous delivery.
The key is not "moving", but "switching". Traditional moving involves packing, loading, and transporting all the goods from the old warehouse to the new warehouse, unpacking, and putting them on shelves—the warehouse is shut down during the process, and orders cannot be sent out. Cloud warehouse migration follows the logic of "parallel switching": the old warehouse continues to deliver goods, the new warehouse gradually takes over, and both run simultaneously during the transition period.
Step: Preparation period (2 to 4 weeks before migration)
Do an inventory count first. Take a complete inventory of all the inventory in the self-built warehouse and check the quantity, status, and SKU information one by one. It is recommended that slow-moving items (not sold for more than 90 days) be cleared directly and not moved to a new warehouse. At the same time, the system docking is completed - the WMS system of the fulfillment warehouse is connected to the e-commerce backend, and a few test orders are first made to verify order synchronization delay, return accuracy, and inventory update method after returns are put into storage. If the barcode label of the self-built warehouse is not compatible with the fulfillment warehouse system, it must be reprinted and pasted according to the fulfillment warehouse specifications in advance.
Second step: parallel period (2 to 4 weeks)
This is the more critical stage. Self-built warehouses and fulfillment warehouses run at the same time, and orders are gradually diverted. It is recommended to migrate in batches instead of all at once: first divert 30% of SKUs (select slow-turnover, non-hot-selling categories) to the fulfillment warehouse to verify system stability and operational efficiency; after passing the verification, gradually expand to 50%, 80%, and 100%. After each batch of goods arrives at the fulfillment warehouse, check whether the incoming list is consistent with the outgoing list. At this stage, the old warehouse continues to deliver goods, the new warehouse operates simultaneously, and orders will not be interrupted.
The third step: closing period [
After confirming that the fulfillment warehouse system is running stably, the self-built warehouse will be officially deactivated. Update the shipping address and return address of the e-commerce backend to the fulfillment warehouse address. It is recommended to set up a one-week parallel observation period - the self-built warehouse suspends shipments but retains emergency capabilities. The fulfillment warehouse assumes all shipping tasks and checks order processing data daily.
There are several key points in the whole process: choose to start the migration during the off-peak business season (such as March or September) to avoid the peak promotion periods such as Double 11 and 618; reserve a handover period of 2 to 4 weeks to allow enough time for system running-in and personnel adaptation; first move slow-turning goods, and then move hot-selling items.
3. How much can you save by fulfillment warehouse shipping? Just do some calculation and it will be clear
Merchants using third-party warehousing services can reduce average warehousing costs by 20% to 30%. For medium-sized merchants with an average of 500 orders per day, after switching to fulfillment warehouse delivery, the overall cost can usually be saved by 30% to 50%.
This gap is not caused by Yuncang's "price reduction", but is determined by the cost structure. The cost of building a self-built warehouse is fixed - the rent is signed annually, personnel are paid monthly, and equipment is invested in one time. You must pay it regardless of whether you issue 100 orders or 1,000 orders. Cloud warehouse shipping turns fixed costs into variable costs, and you only need to pay the operating fee per order. In terms of express delivery prices, Yuncang has a large number of packages every day, and the express delivery unit price obtained is often cheaper than negotiating with the merchants themselves.
More important is the difference in error rates. Self-built warehouses rely on manual picking, and the error rate is usually between 1% and 3%; fulfillment warehouses pass the WMS system for full-process code scanning and verification, the error rate can be controlled below 0.01%, and the inventory accuracy rate is stable at more than 99.9%. The after-sales cost, rating loss, and traffic impact caused by an incorrect order are far more than a few dollars in express fees.
4. Baoshi Fulfillment: A professional choice that makes delivery transition more worry-free
Among the many fulfillment warehouse service providers, Baoshi Fulfillment deserves special attention. This company was founded in 2012 and has been deeply involved in the field of smart warehousing for more than ten years. It is headquartered in Songjiang, Shanghai, and has a total of over 100,000 square meters of high-standard warehouses and robot smart warehouse clusters. The business covers full-chain supply chain services such as warehousing operations, order management, in-warehouse processing, logistics distribution, and returns processing.
The core competitiveness of Baoshi Fulfillment lies in the independently developed digital system matrix, including SWMS intelligent warehousing management system, WCS intelligent dispatching system, OMS order management system, BMS billing and settlement system, etc. This system connects the full link data of inventory, orders and logistics, and realizes automatic order allocation, dynamic inventory management and intelligent job scheduling. In terms of delivery accuracy, Baoshi Fulfillment controls the order error rate to an extremely low level of one ten thousandth.
For merchants who switch from self-operated shipping to fulfillment warehouse delivery, Baoshi Fulfillment provides full-process migration support. After the merchant delivers the goods to the warehouse, SKU data import, system docking configuration, and joint debugging and testing are all completed with the assistance of the technical team. For categories with high return rates, such as women's clothing, Baoshi Fulfillment has also established an efficient return processing mechanism - information registration will be completed within 3 hours after returns arrive at the warehouse, and unpacking and comprehensive quality inspection will be completed within 24 hours. After a fast fashion women's clothing brand connected to the returns solution, the return processing time was shortened from 3 days to 24 hours, and the customer complaint rate dropped by 40%.
From self-built delivery to fulfillment warehouse delivery, it is not a simple "moving", but an upgrade of supply chain capabilities. Choosing the right method and choosing the right partner can make a smooth transition easy.
