The social media and e-commerce integration game is getting stronger by the minute. With over a billion active users, TikTok is continuously cementing itself as a social media giant while delving into e-commerce and merging the best of both worlds. It has become the go-to place, especially for younger people seeking products that they want to purchase. With its intuitive interface and integrative shopping experience, it has changed the way people are shopping online.
With TikTok Shopping becoming an important platform to engage with for the best brands and e-commerce sellers, TikTok has also conducted several developments to its app to cater for in-app shopping, and to provide an integrated shipping and logistics platform for smooth delivery of goods. What’s nicer is that you can integrate your TikTok shop to your other platforms such as Shopify and WooCommerce for a more streamlined sales channel management experience.
But when we say integrated and streamlined, we tell you, it gets better. You can do way more through availing the services of a logistics engine – that is a service that integrates groundbreaking software which integrates all your channels into one, and the physical infrastructure laid out domestically and internationally in order to ensure the smooth, safe and satisfactory delivery of seller products to their most loyal customers.
Why integrate?
Integration has its many benefits. For one, it minimizes the focus and energy you have to exert when managing your many sales channel platforms. With a logistics engine by your side, you only have to connect these many online platforms and the software will do all the work for you as it updates real-time. Even offline datasets such as those in spreadsheets can be uploaded to your unified hub in just a few clicks. The system also minimizes human errors in inputting the data.
With a unified hub, you can also check and monitor your inventory across all channels, helping you strategize where to put most of your stocks according to intelligent insights based on your overall sales and inbound orders.
With a logistics engine’s services, you can also make sure that the end-to-end fulfillment process will be smooth, safe and satisfactory for you and your customers with the wide network cast by logistics engine providers like Locad who has partnered with warehouse hubs and third-party logistics (3PL) providers in key locations in major countries and even across borders. Shipping internationally was just a dream for your small business, but with the help of a logistics engine, it now can be a reality.
Steps to set up your logistics engine
Partnering with a logistics engine is like having a best friend – helping you every step of the way, but also telling you honestly where your strengths and weaknesses lie so that you can tread the path to overall improvement. Having the services of a logistics engine under your belt is easily achievable through a set of steps. Here, we use the particular example of signing up for Locad’s service as an example to guide you.
- Assess your needs
Of course, you cannot start without knowing what your problem areas are. So we advise you to sit down and carefully think about the issues you have faced recently when it comes to order management and delivery fulfillment. What have you done well, and where do you need help? This will help you have the necessary clarity on which services you need. This will become your jump-off point, where your assigned Locad services agent will base their recommendations, give you a quotation, and adapt the contract to your needs. Locad is your partner, so we highly suggest that you become very open to your agent when talking where your needs lie.
- Sign up
Signing up is a fairly easy process. You just have to make your way into the Locad website (golocad.com) and search for the Sign Up button. Tip: you can find it at the top of the right side of your browser when you’re viewing the Locad site. Here, you will be asked to provide some important information such as your name, email address, phone number and the name of your company. You will also be asked if you want to avail Locad’s full package called the Fulfillment Engine which will let them handle every process of end-to-end fulfillment. They also offer a shipping-only option which they call the Shipping Engine.
- Have a session with your agent
After you have signed up, a certified services agent from Locad will reach out to you and discuss the requirements and your specific needs. Through this conversation, the sales agent will determine whether your company is a good fit for the services Locad offers, and whether Locad can be the one to help you solve your business issues. The sales agent will also help you determine which plan is most suitable for you, depending on your concrete needs and of course, your budget.
- Finalize the contract
Once the needs are discussed, and you are settled with the plan you are availing, a contract will be drafted to formalize your partnership with Locad. Therein the costs of your plan will be reflected. It can be any of the three plans: Startup, Flexi and Professional, which varies in price and fulfillment costs. Your session with the sales agent can help you determine which one is the best fit for your business. The Professional Plan, however, is the only plan that gives you a dedicated account manager that can focus on the growth of your brand. Once the contract is agreed upon, and signed by both parties, then onboarding can commence.
- Connect and integrate
The first thing you have to do during onboarding is to link, connect and integrate all your sales channel platform accounts to the Locad Control Tower. By doing this, you will get to use Locad’s unified sales management hub that provides you with an overview of how your business is doing across all channels. Besides this overview, it also provides you data on your orders for each sales platform giving you an idea from which channel your orders come from. Here also is where your stocks will go live once you send them to the Locad team. By availing of Locad’s fulfillment engine, you can relax and let the system do the fulfillment – that is, picking and packing, for you. All you have to do is send your inventory and Locad’s ecosystem of management software and delivery infrastructure will do the magic for you.
- Send your stocks and store
Locad’s network of warehouses, 3PL providers, fulfillment centers and dropoff points is vast enough for one to be near you, and one to be near your customer wherever that may be. As soon as you avail of the logistics engine service, your plans and pricing all set, and your sales channels connected, you can now send your products to Locad and wait for them to go live. Once live, these stocks can be ordered through the usual sales channels, which sends the orders to the Locad Control Tower. From thereon, these orders are to be picked up from the nearest warehouse to the customer which has the stock of your product, and prepared for delivery and transit to your most trusted 3PL provider, which will then handle the product until it reaches your customers’ doorsteps.
- Pick, pack: fulfilled
Fulfillment just gets more fulfilling with Locad. The logistics engine drastically changes the way we handle fulfillment. When before you personally pack and drop off your products to your sales channel’s logistics partners, that all begins to change now. With Locad’s services, your products are stored in a warehouse hub where you only pay for the actual inventory space that you use. It’s not a fixed fee, but a flexible payment to make sure you only spend for what you actually use. Because Locad already handles your inventory, the fulfillment process is easier. From the warehouse, your products can be picked and packed at the very same day that the order is placed. And each order is fulfilled in the fulfillment center nearest the location of the buyer.
Locad also allows you to have an overview of your stocks in different warehouse locations so you can balance, deploy and redeploy your products based on where the demand comes from.
- The ship has sailed: worry-free shipping
Drastically cutting the time it takes for orders to be picked and packed, it is no secret that the orders are brought to the 3PL providers faster with a logistics engine compared to what you experience without one. But also because the Locad Control Tower also has the necessary information to determine which 3PL provider can be most reliable at a specific location, time and product type, there is also less hassle in delivery making sure for a swift and safe last-mile delivery experience.
This is possible due to Locad’s carrier integration wherein they partner with the most trusted and most reliable 3PL providers in each country of operation. For example, it has partnerships with Australia Post and Sendle in Australia, DHL and Lalamove in Southeast Asian countries, as well as the most trusted local logistics providers in the Philippines, Thailand and Singapore. Cross-border shipping is also possible through Locad’s network of international shippers, with an overview of additional taxes and requirements that you have to accomplish, making your international shipping journey a lot easier. It will also give you peace of mind knowing that you don’t have to do all those requirements alone.
- Monitor your orders, check insights and analytics
Real-time reports are available via the Control Tower if you want to track the location of the products that you have delivered. This neat feature in your unified hub can be handy if you are worrying about where your deliveries might be when you hear news of a calamity or incident in its route. The information you also get from these real-time tracking reports gives you what you need to properly answer questions by your customers and clients pertaining to where their items are.
Aside from tracking reports, you can also find insights in your sales management hub. These tell you which products sell the most, where they sell the most, which products are lagging and other similar information. The hub also suggests some steps you can do, which products to bundle or put in a combo, for them to sell better than previously.
Level up your business with a logistics engine
While you have a TikTok shop and you sell products through the platform, the true goal of an online business is to be a business on the whole internet, and not just one platform. With the various platforms that have sprung in the past years, it can be hard for you to keep up, especially if you are a solo business owner, or just working with a small team.
Having the help of a logistics engine at your fingertips, and the holistic picture that a unified hub can give you, you can be well on your way to bringing your business to the next level. With a centralized management channel, you can be sure that none of your orders are missed, and become missing along the way during delivery. In a logistics engine, you are partnering with professionals in softwares for e-commerce management, fulfillment, delivery. Plus, the software gives you some insights on how to strategize your product innovation, digital and on ground marketing efforts. From these, you can have a clearer idea of what to do to boost your overall sales across all your channels, instead of focusing on one.
When these very taxing, yet very crucial, tasks are unloaded from your back and professionals help you carry them, you can now focus on things that you could not previously think of. Without worrying about packing, you can think of how to market your products better. Without thinking of talking to a 3PL provider, you can now talk to influencers to boost your brand presence. Locad takes on your fulfillment tasks, so you can focus on being CEO of your business. So what are you waiting for, sign up for a logistics engine today!
