If your company has to fulfill orders for customers as a part of your day-to-day operations — such as if you run an online retail business that ships orders directly to your customers — then you might need a little bit of help with fulfilling orders. Many people who run these businesses don't actually know that there are product fulfillment services out there that can help. These companies offer various services for companies like yours, depending on the company that you hire. These are some of the things that a product fulfillment service might do for your business.

Pull Items for Each Order

You might have plenty of inventory in stock, and you might have all of your inventory neatly organized and stored in a warehouse. However, you might find that it's really time-consuming for you to pull all of the products from the shelves that have to be boxed up and shipped to your customers. If this is the case, then you might really appreciate hiring a product fulfillment service. The professionals who work for these companies will look at each of your orders and will then pull the necessary items from the shelves so that they can fulfill each of your orders for you.

Make Sure Orders Are Packaged Properly

Once the items have been pulled from the shelf and have been put together for each order, someone from the product fulfillment service should help with carefully and properly packaging all of these products so that they will be ready for shipping. They may use foam sheets, packing peanuts, or other materials to help ensure that items are protected, and they may package items in cardboard boxes, plastic pouches, or whatever other shipping materials you choose to use. They should be willing to work with whatever packaging materials you have, but they can also provide recommendations about appropriate packaging for your products, too.

Update Inventory

Of course, it's important for you to be aware of which products are on your shelves, so keeping a good inventory is important. Someone from a product fulfillment service can help with keeping your inventory properly updated as they pull items from your shelves to fulfill your orders.

Prepare Packages for Shipping

Lastly, once your product fulfillment service has packaged each order so that it's ready for shipping, they should assist with putting the items on pallets, transporting them to your loading dock, and otherwise preparing them so that they will be ready to be shipped off to their destination.

Contact a company like Outsource Packaging to learn more.