How Autofulfil is delivering real brand value
As e-commerce has become the norm, many firms have dipped a toe in the water, but one Irish business is helping them to dive right in
When opportunity comes knocking, some businesses are ready to seize the moment. This is very much the case with Autofulfil, which has expanded from a side project founded to use excess capacity to the leader in its field in Ireland.
Founded by Schoolbooks.ie in 2013, Autofulfil, Ireland’s leading eCommerce fulfilment centre supporting online direct-to-consumer retail brands from around the world, was built because no existing fulfilment centre could deal with Schoobooks.ie's large order volumes.
Today, the business has expanded to the point where it is now the e-commerce linchpin for clients across Ireland and farther afield. “We’re built for online retailers by an online retailer,” said Gina Galligan, Autofulfil’s managing director.
Primarily working with small and medium enterprise (SMEs), Autofulfil handles picking, packing and shipping for a range of businesses.
However, Galligan said these core activities support a broader mission: brand building through delighting customers.
“Our customers are ready to grow, they've built their brands, and they have their following. They've usually been doing the fulfilment themselves, but at a certain point it just becomes too difficult,” she said.
Clients such as Blank Canvas Cosmetics demonstrate this: the company moved its fulfilment to Autofulfil, just ahead of a massive Black Friday spike in orders.
This is precisely the kind of scenario that can make or break a company.
“You have 1,000 orders per month and then it goes up to 25,000. It should be a cause for celebration, but it can be a cause of panic,” said Galligan.
The problem is one of rapid scaling, something that is very difficult for even large companies to do, let alone SMEs, in the face of property leases and staffing costs.
“You’re flexing up and down across space and team. For example, we have one client who will do 40k hampers before Christmas and you need space and a team to fulfil those orders,” Galligan said.
Indeed, negotiating leases, getting the equipment and exiting leases are just not possible for many businesses. Autofulil solves this problem, including by deploying technologies from barcodes to a cloud-based warehouse management system (WMS).
“It’s about people, process, space and technology,” said Galligan.
All four have been a success for Autofulfil, which is in the process of expansion.
With its more than 9,200 square metres (100,000 square feet) fulfilment centre in Galway already operational, the company has now purchased a second site consisting of 30,660 square metres (330,000 square feet) centre on a 30-hectare (75-acre) site.
Improving the experience
Fulfilment is an opportunity, but it can also make or break an online retailer.
According to a recent survey, 57 per cent of online shoppers say they’ve stopped buying from a merchant because of a bad experience, or because of a competitor that offered a better one. This is where Autofulfil steps in.
“All it takes is one bad delivery experience to lose a customer for life. If your competitor is set up to scale easily, they’ll take your business and you’ll have a hard time winning it back,” said Galligan.
This isn’t just an issue for online retailers, though. Even fulfilment centres can struggle to deliver quickly and accurately during peak shopping seasons.
“We double our staff during peak seasons and, for our client Schoolbooks.ie, for example, we send out millions of items for them in just a few weeks every summer ahead of the school year starting. During the Black Friday shopping season, we’ve heard from clients that other fulfilment centres can take weeks or even months to get orders out that we can fulfil in days. So it’s important for e-commerce brands to have partners capable of flexibly scaling up and down throughout the year,” Galligan said.
Brexit has been an opportunity for Autofulfil, too, with British-based retailers now struggling to serve the Irish and wider EU markets.
“The main advantage is that there is just one point where the customs and duty are due. It really reduced frictional costs and leads to faster and more affordable order fulfilment,” said Galligan.
In the domestic market, there is also a real opportunity in e-commerce. There is a gap in the Irish economy, Galligan said, that can easily be remedied with the right fulfilment partner to generate more local retail sales online.
“Irish consumers are the biggest international shoppers in the world, often due to high local delivery costs from Irish retailers’ online stores, which we can alleviate with our low-cost fulfilment and shipping solutions,” she said.
