The previous article wrote about cross-border e-commerce in overseas warehouses "one piece of dropshipping, transshipment, return and label removal.""Introduction of the business. On this basis, this article will make a more detailed analysis of the difference between dropshipping and transshipment, hoping to help sellers
A drop shipping emphasizes the role of warehousing, and the goods will generally be stored in the warehouse for a long time after arriving at the warehouse, and then dismantled and sent out according to the upstream order instructions. Therefore, e-commerce sellers will pay more attention to inventory data, and this inventory data is also accurate to the SKU, because SKU means stock keeping unit. This is also the standard service of our common warehouse, but it is mistakenly called a drop shipping in the field of overseas warehouses.
Transshipment emphasizes the role of transit, and the goods will not stay too much after arriving at the warehouse, but simply unpack, sort, and then immediately send them to the FBA warehouse. This process may not involve receiving, shelves, inventory changes and other businesses at all, friends who understand the warehousing industry may have heard a term called cross-docking, in fact, this kind of transshipment is a form of cross-docking.
If the transfer is sent out in the form of cross-docking, then for some not too large warehouses, in fact, there is no need to use the system at all, and it can be solved directly with excel. At present, there are many overseas warehouse service providers, especially those who are mainly engaged in transshipment business, and they are indeed using Excel to manage warehouses.
However, the actual overseas warehouse business is not so clear and organized. After some goods arrive at the warehouse, some need to be transferred to FBA warehouse, some need to go to a third-party overseas warehouse, and some need to be put on the warehouse for backup.
At this time, if you define dropshipping and transshipment, you will find that the boundary is not clear at the beginning. Because some warehousing orders are pure transshipment and do not need to be received and put on the shelves, while some warehousing orders are issued on behalf of the goods and need to be received and put on the shelves, and some have ...... both
In view of the fact that the boundary between the two may be difficult to distinguish between the two in the business, the current mainstream system design scheme in the industry generally uses the inventory type to distinguish the two parts of the business. For example, divide the inventory type into two sets:
01.Product inventory.
02.Inventory is transferred.
Product inventory is granular to the SKU dimension, while transshipment inventory is granular to the container dimension.
Due to Amazon's requirements, the goods sent to the FBA warehouse must be in the form of FCL or pallet, and the packing details or palletization details need to be predicted in advance. Therefore, many sellers will pack the box according to the requirements before the domestic factory leaves the warehouse, and then send it to the overseas warehouse without unpacking, and directly send it to the Amazon warehouse according to the original box. And the box here refers to the box that transfers inventory.
This is the norm, but there are some special cases. For example, it is also common to pack SKUs in overseas warehouses, affix the box mark, and send them to FBA warehouses. Or the products that were originally stocked were removed from the shelves by Amazon, and these FCL products need to be taken out for delivery on other platforms.
These two services belong to one of the value-added services of warehouse processing, which can also be called grouping and unpacking, which is somewhat similar to assembly and disassembly. Assembly and disassembly correspond to the inventory conversion between single product SKUs and combination SKUs, while grouping and unpacking are direct inventory conversion ...... between product inventory and transshipment inventory
Based on the above description, we will find that when the system supports two sets of inventory, it actually means that the transferred goods also need to be received and put on the shelves, so that there will be corresponding transfer inventory. However, because the transshipment has the characteristics of fast in and out, and the whole in and out, the receipt and shelving of the transshipment are actually different from the receipt and shelving of ordinary products, and the same reason, the outbound will be different.
Attach a picture (click to enlarge to view), so that you have a more intuitive understanding:
One piece dropshipping FBA transshipment