Product fulfillment is hard but doesn't have to be a pain. There are plenty of very sophisticated 3PL warehouses that can do any type of fulfillment you need. At my last job I managed an e-commerce business and our process was so streamlined that we'd never actually touch our products. They were delivered from production directly to the 3PL fulfillment warehouses where the items were unpacked and stored. When the orders came in items were packed up, and shipped out, including international delivery. When items were sent out, we got the tracking numbers for the packages back so we could send customers e-mails (again all automated).
Some of the newer operations have staff on site that has electronics expertise and offer troubleshooting of arriving items, etc. It seems that having them flash NFC stickers shouldn't be soo bad to teach them (but maybe expensive).
These all require upfront payments in the 6-figure range, right?
As far as I know, good 3PL services are at best like Braintree, not like Stripe. That is, they work well but don't lower the barriers so that it's easy to start using them.
Certainly. None of these require 6 figure payments. There are some setup fees, (very reasonable) and then they usually charge per action (items packed, computers checked, etc).
Forgot to mention, there is a lot of pros/cons to 3rd party fulfillment and it has to be done right. If you seriously decide to look into 3PL warehouses, I'll be happy to give you more info about what you need to look at.
I agree with you 100%. I briefly looked into fulfillment for a previous business idea, and, I think if there was a stripe for fulfillment, there would be more innovative companies coming out that would ship physical products.
Sincerely and PicPlum are two more examples of companies that have to deal with this pain.
It's hard to imagine Amazon offering specialized services for a class of products such as pre-programming NFC stickers, so I'd say you are safe from them.
A minor typo on your site:"If you are ordering NFC tags in bulk, need stickers pre-programmed..."
the pre-programming part isn't a problem, it's mixing skus to make an order.
when we started in June, we'd get like an order or two a day, and it wasn't too bad. the daily trip to the post office was almost a welcome break.
now, we get as many orders in a day as we used to get a month back then, and it's hard to scale. we've made a lot of the processes as efficient as possible, but the whole thing is still a pain in the ass.
Fulfillment as a service seems like it'd be a good business. No stressing about packaging, customer service etc etc
The closest thing that comes close to solving it is Amazon's fulfillment services (http://www.amazonservices.com/content/fulfillment-by-amazon....), but it doesn't quite work and is US only.
A hard problem to solve indeed (and one we've discussed).