Cross-Border Fulfillment 101: The Guide to Scaling Globally

In the era of global eCommerce, cross-border fulfillment plays a critical role in helping businesses overcome geographical boundaries and reach and serve customers in new markets. Through the process of cross-border shipping and order completion, online companies can expand their reach on an international scale.

In addition, it allows them to ship goods from a warehouse in one country to customers in another, meeting the increasing global demand of consumers.

However, cross-border fulfillment also presents many challenges for businesses. They have to comply with customs, tax, and import regulations in each target market, while also effectively managing international logistics and courier services to ensure fast and reliable deliveries. Handling cross-border returns and exchanges is also an important task to provide a good shopping experience for customers.

Despite the additional effort required, cross-border fulfillment still offers a tremendous opportunity for online businesses. It helps them access and serve customers in new markets, expanding the scale and scope of their cross-border operations. This is a trend that cannot be overlooked in the context of the rapidly growing global eCommerce landscape.

What is Cross-border Fulfillment?

Cross-border fulfillment is an important part of the cross-border selling strategy for eCommerce businesses. It includes the transportation, storage, and delivery of products from one country to another to meet the shopping needs of customers worldwide.

Cross-border fulfillment has particularly seen strong development in recent years as it has opened up business opportunities for companies as well as international shopping opportunities for customers.

>> Learn more: 

• Flexible Fulfillment 
• What Does Fulfillment Batching Mean

The detailed process of cross-border fulfillment guide:

Importing goods:

• Businesses need to gather information on import regulations, customs procedures, and labeling requirements in the importing market.
• Businesses need to register and comply with import regulations, complete customs formalities to import goods into the destination country.

Logistics and warehouse partner selection:

• Search and evaluate reputable logistics service providers in the target market.
• Establish warehouse/distribution centers in the destination country for storage and inventory management.
• Negotiate terms for transportation, warehousing, delivery, and support services.

Store and manage inventory:

• Businesses implement inventory management solutions such as demand forecasting, inventory tracking, placing new orders, and efficient allocation of goods.
• Optimize the ordering and delivery process to meet customer needs.

Processing orders and delivering goods:

• Receive and process orders from customers in the destination country.
• Check product availability and select appropriate shipping methods.
• Deliver goods quickly and safely to consumers.
• Provide order tracking information to customers.

Customer service and returns processing:

• Setting up customer support channels such as hotline, email, chat, etc.
• Establishing procedures for receiving and processing return requests, exchanges, and warranties.
• Ensuring service quality and promptly resolving customer complaints.

The cross-border fulfillment process requires close coordination between inventory management, order processing, and customer support. Therefore, businesses need significant preparation and investment to implement it effectively.

Advantages of Cross-border Fulfillment

Cross-border fulfillment is always prioritized by businesses for development because it brings many benefits if utilized properly. These benefits are effective solutions that help businesses expand their operations and enhance their competitive capabilities in the global market. Specific advantages can be mentioned as follows:

• Expanding the market: Cross-border fulfillment at multi-market allows businesses to access and serve customers in different countries, thereby reaching new potential markets such as the United States, Japan, South Korea, Singapore, etc. Engaging in cross-border business contributes to increasing opportunities for sales growth and expanding market share in new markets.
• Reducing costs: Cross-border fulfillment does not require businesses to invest in building infrastructure in new markets. By efficiently utilizing logistics services, supplier warehouses such as fast shipping, automated warehouses, and shipment tracking technology will help businesses save significant operating costs, storage costs, and labor compared to expanding their own infrastructure.
• Improving customer experience: Cross-border fulfillment meets the needs of customers in new markets in a flexible and timely manner, allowing businesses to provide multiple options for shipping and payment methods that are suitable for customer needs. This shortens delivery time, enhances service quality, and improves the customer experience.
• Effective risk management: Businesses will minimize legal risks and customs procedures by choosing a comprehensive logistics partner to accompany them. This helps businesses reduce risks related to inventory, working capital, and business operations. It contributes significantly to expanding and narrowing operations in new markets according to demand.
• Increasing competition: Cross-border fulfillment helps businesses reach and serve customers globally and expand their operations. As a result, businesses will also increase their competitive opportunities with larger competitors, gaining more experience and stronger resources. Additionally, businesses will also enhance their competitive abilities in terms of pricing, service quality, and meeting customer demands.

Challenges of Cross-border Fulfillment

On the contrary to the advantages, cross-border fulfillment also comes with certain difficulties that can cause a lot of trouble for businesses. Below are the common challenges:

• Compliance with legal regulations: Each country has different regulations regarding taxes, customs, import-export, labeling, and packaging of products. This requires businesses to thoroughly research and comply with each regulation in each market. For example, some countries have requirements for labeling in the local language, or strict standards for labeling ingredients, nutritional information, etc. Failure to comply with these regulations can result in products being seized at the border or fined.
• Managing logistics and transportation: The transportation of goods from one country to another is a whole process. Therefore, managing the import process, warehousing, packaging, and cross-border transportation becomes very complex. In addition, the transportation time is usually longer than domestic delivery. If businesses do not promptly address any issues that arise, delivery times can extend to several weeks, which directly affects the customer experience.
• Costs: The complex preparation along with the prolonged transportation time will also lead to increased costs. This includes transportation costs, insurance, and customs duties that are often unstable and difficult to predict. These are all costs that have a significant impact on profit.
• Finance and taxes: In addition to transportation costs, managing taxes and various fees in each market is also very complex. Therefore, businesses need an effective financial, accounting, and risk management system to accurately budget and optimize profits.
• Customer experience: Issues such as handling returns and refunds for foreign customers will become quite complicated if businesses do not have a professional customer care department.
• Risks and security: The risk of loss and damage to goods during long-distance transportation is significant, especially for fragile or high-value products. Furthermore, ensuring the security and confidentiality of customer information during transactions and payments is also crucial.

To overcome these challenges, businesses need to invest in building global logistics capabilities, collaborate with local partners, and apply modern technology to manage the entire cross-border supply chain.

Cross Border Fulfillment vs. Localized Fulfillment

Cross-border fulfillment and localized fulfillment are the two most common types of goods transportation today. However, each type will have different strengths and weaknesses suitable for different purposes.

This makes businesses quite hesitant in choosing the best type of fulfillment for their business. Below is a more specific comparison table of the differences between these two types.

In summary, cross-border fulfillment offers opportunities to expand global markets but requires higher supply chain management and financial capabilities, while localized fulfillment has simpler processes but limited business scope. Both have their benefits and limitations. Therefore, businesses need to consider choosing the option that is suitable for their strategy, resources, and management capabilities.

EFEX - The Best Ecommerce Order Fulfillment Services in Vietnam

Cross-border fulfillment will help your business expand globally and generate huge profits. These tasks imply that your business must face a series of documents and complex procedures to clear goods through the border. To effectively solve these arising issues, you should choose to collaborate with a reputable logistics unit to accompany you.

EFEX - The best cross-border fulfillment services will help you do that. Our cross-border fulfillment solution is a service that we confidently possess years of experience with impressive daily shipment numbers. With EFEX, you won't have to worry about any issues related to packaging, customs clearance, or delivering the goods to customers, because we have the most professional process to do that.

EFEX service will help you increase the success rate of delivery up to 98% from domestic to international. In addition, you will have the option to choose the appropriate shipping carrier based on the fees and delivery time you want. EFEX service also provides professional customs clearance support by understanding the customs policies of each country. Thanks to easy customs clearance, international shipping time becomes fast, only 5-8 days. We have delivered to 220+ countries worldwide and insured 100% of the value of goods throughout the transportation process.

Finally, EFEX also has an international transportation network in many countries such as the United States, China, Thailand, Singapore, etc. EFEX is ready to become a bridge, delivering your goods from Vietnam to all over the world in a short time. Let's contact us for free consultation and special offers!