Explore Warehousing Solutions for your eBay Business
As a cross border seller on eBay, the location of your items play an important role in attracting customers. On top of that, strategic location planning can help you save time, money and lower your operation costs. Warehousing solutions may help you achieve all this. Read on to understand more.
There are 2 types of warehousing solutions:
Offshore
This is when items are stored in the seller’s residing country and then shipped to the buyer’s location.
Onshore
This is when the items are shipped in bulk to the buyer’s residing country and stored in warehouses or fulfilment centres.
- Increased visibility
- Better rankings on search pages
- Improved reach to domestic buyers
- Save time & money
- Lower operation costs
- Reasonably priced shipping solutions
- Growth of sales
These are the transit times via Sea Freight:
These are the transit times via Express:
As a trader, you will most likely not be experienced with sea freight export. Small to medium sized sellers may find it difficult to negotiate volume decisions and operational systems with exporters & warehouse operators.
Incorporating warehousing solutions into your business strategy can be simpler with a facilitator.
These are the warehouse locations currently available in the United States and Australia.
This table shows the comparisons between the different shipping services.
| Sea Freight | Air Freight | Express | |
| Appointed shipping agent in Customs | Yes | Yes | No |
| Overall shipping cost | Low | Average | High |
| Transit time | 30 -40 days | 5 -6 days | 1 – 4 days |
| IOR requirement | Yes | Yes | No |
This feedback from sellers shows how warehouse solutions have helped support their business.
Here is an example of how warehouse solutions have helped increase sales in one year:
Before taking steps to implement the Onshore Warehouse Solution to your business, consider these criteria below:
- Does your product have special requirements and/or document support to export from the country of origin?
- Does your product need special storage treatment in the warehouse? E.g. Room temperature control.
- Is your product bulky?
- Is your product fast or slow moving?
If you check all the boxes above, follow these steps:
- Select suitable inventory for warehousing
- Talk to your account manager about warehousing
- Attend pre-shipment Education by Rich Mom
It is important that you understand and adhere to eBay’s Warehouse Policy. In order to utilise the warehouse/forward deploy service, you must consistently meet the criteria stated in the policy.
Any non-compliance to this policy may result in strict action on your account.
Example: Listing the item location in the US but the item is being shipped from Kuala Lumpur.
You can also monitor your performance in the CBT Seller Dashboard or refer here for more information.
