Social commerce – which involves the buying and selling of products and services directly through social media platforms like TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, and Pinterest – is becoming increasingly popular. For shoppers, social commerce offers an opportunity to discover, explore, and purchase products without ever leaving their social media feed.
And we’re seeing a steady rise in the number of social commerce channels that businesses are selling on: Five years ago, online retailers only sold via an average of 2.6 social commerce channels, but this has increased to 4 channels today, and is expected to reach 5.4 in the next five years – according to recent Forrester research, commissioned by Amazon.
However, as your business expands across these new social commerce channels, handling logistics operations like inventory management and order fulfillment can become a major challenge. This is where a third-party logistics (3PL) provider, such as such as Amazon Multi-Channel Fulfillment (MCF) can help. In this blog, we highlight some of the reasons why you should consider outsourcing your social commerce fulfillment to a 3PL like MCF and explain how to get started.
Why outsource your social commerce fulfillment to a 3PL?
As your social commerce business grows, keeping up with inventory management and order fulfillment can become a complex undertaking. To deliver orders rapidly and reliably for your social commerce shoppers, you must be able to:
- Manage the end-to-end logistics process, from storing your inventory in warehouses to processing orders, to picking, packing, and shipping products and delivering them to customers’ doorsteps.
- Scale your logistics operations to handle spikes in demand, which may occur when one of your products goes “viral” or during peak periods like the end-of-year holiday shopping season.
- Adhere to each social media platform’s fulfillment requirements.
Fortunately, a 3PL – like MCF – can help you in all of these areas, so that you can delight shoppers with a fast, frictionless delivery experience and drive revenue growth on your social commerce channels.
How can MCF help businesses fulfill orders on TikTok?
If you are an Amazon seller, you can use your existing inventory with Amazon to fulfill orders on social commerce channels with MCF. There is no additional sign-up or inventory transfer required.
When it comes to speed and reliability, there are a number of other reasons why you might consider using MCF for your social commerce fulfillment:
- Multiple delivery speed options: MCF offers multiple delivery speed options to best meet your needs, with our fastest click-to-delivery within 2 business days.
- Reliable performance: With MCF, you can satisfy your shoppers with a >97% on-time delivery rate1, deliveries made 7 days a week, and 99.98% undamaged delivery rate2.
- Ability to scale: MCF, which utilizes Amazon’s global fulfillment, is capable of efficiently handling spikes in order volumes. Read this case study to learn how HalloweenCostumes.com used MCF to manage a 15x increase in orders during peak shopping season.
- Fast dispatch and tracking numbers: MCF dispatches 98% of Standard speed orders within 3 business days1 and provides real-time tracking on 100% of orders.
- Inventory consolidation: It can be hard to predict which products will be popular on which channels. By using a single pool of inventory, you can strategically allocate your stock to various channels to meet consumer demand. This approach can help you improve inventory turnover and reduce stockouts.
1 For standard-sized items that are already stowed with Amazon fulfillment centers and shipped in the 48 contiguous states
2 Based on all orders fulfilled by MCF in the United States from January 2023 through March 2024
How can you automate your TikTok Shop order fulfillment by using a MCF integration?
If you are looking to automate order fulfillment and inventory management for social commerce channels, you can use one of many integrations for social commerce, such as WebBee, LINGXING, or Connector by Silk to seamlessly connect your TikTok Shop with your Amazon Seller Central account.
Once connected, the integration will enable MCF to automatically fulfill orders placed from TikTok directly from your corresponding Amazon listings. This ensures accurate inventory tracking and faster order processing times. MCF Integrations can also enable you to provide your customers with real-time updates on their order status from order placement until their item reaches their doorstep.
To find the right MCF integration for your business, explore MCF’s featured social commerce integrations or use the MCF Integration Selection Tool.
Conclusion
We continue to hear success stories from many ecommerce businesses around the world that leverage MCF and use MCF integrations to offer fast, reliable fulfillment on TikTok Shop with MCF:
So if you’re looking to expand your ecommerce business, scale your fulfillment, and drive superior delivery performance and top-line growth on new channels like TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook, then you will likely want to engage a 3PL provider, like MCF.
