CALA Fulfillment Basics
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      3. CALA Fulfillment Basics

      What is CALA Fulfillment?

      An explanation of CALA Fulfillment, what is included, and how much it costs

      Overview

      CALA Fulfillment is a connection between your web store, the CALA platform, and our network of fulfillment providers. As a participant in CALA Fulfillment, you're assigned a dedicated fulfillment and logistics expert, who develops a customized fulfillment plan that is tailored to your specific needs. Some of the key areas we work through are:

      • 3PL Network Management: CALA works with a network of 15 warehouses located in 9 different states in the USA, as well as facilities in Canada, UK, and EU. Based on your end-customer demographics, shipping volume, tax liability and more, your dedicated CALA F&L expert recommends a warehouse network that will minimize fulfillment costs, storage costs, and time of transit, while keeping your tax liability as simple as possible.

      • Order Fulfillment & Customer Service: Once you're integrated with CALA Fulfillment, the CALA F&L team oversees all of your B2C and B2B order fulfillment and returns. We work with you to write a customized customer service playbook that incorporates everything from your brand's voice and tone, to your return and exchange policies. This playbook is used to train and guide our customer service team to respond to your customers' inquiries according to your brand's specifications.

      CALA Fulfillment Summary:

      • Dedicated fulfillment and logistics expert

      • A customized plan to utilize CALA's 3PL network

      • Oversight, handling and analysis of B2C and B2B orders

      • Dedicated customer support team to support B2C customer support inquiries via email, phone and chat

      • Custom packaging design assistance.

       

      Pricing

      Subscription:

      $500/month Subscription: You get a dedicated fulfillment and logistics expert who works with you to develop a customized fulfillment plan, tailored to your brand and your customers' needs. You get access to our aggregated volume shipping discounts, custom packaging design assistance, customer service team to handle all of your B2C customer service inquiries, and more.

      10% Fulfillment Fee: We're transparent about your fulfillment costs, and we pass them directly on to you. In order to support your dedicated fulfillment and logistics expert, as well as our team of customer service experts, we add 10% to your monthly fulfillment bill.

      Example: In January we fulfilled 1,000 orders to your customers on your behalf.

      • Pick/Pack/Ship/Returns/Storage fees: $5,000

      • 10% Fulfillment Fee: $500

      • Total Cost: $5,500

      Fulfillment Cost Estimates:

      The cost to ship an item from a warehouse to a customer is typically broken down into 3 pieces: Pick, Pack and Ship. Storage and Packaging are the two other components of fulfillment costs.

      • Pick/Pack: Generally, pick and pack fees are bundled together. This is the cost to pay a warehouse worker to pick an item from inventory and pack it into a box or polymailer. Generally, this is charged as a flat rate for the first item picked, then an additional fee for each additional item in an order. For example, a common pick/pack fee structure is $2.39 for the first item, then an additional $0.59 for each additional item. Generally, warehouses will charge less to pick a sticker or marketing insert than they will to pick an additional t-shirt or article of clothing.

      • Ship: The cost of the shipping label. This varies based on the origin and destination locations, as well as the weight and dimensions of the package. Shipping something from CA to CA will be less expensive than shipping something from CA to NY. Shipping a t-shirt will be less expensive than shipping a hoodie. Generally, we estimate that the cost of a shipping label will be around $6-$7 for a t-shirt and $8-$10 for a hoodie. When you add the above pick/pack/ship estimates together, you end up with rough estimates that it will cost about $8-$9 to ship a t-shirt and $10-$11 to ship a hoodie.

      • Storage: For the average collection of 1000 products, we'd estimate monthly storage to be around $150. This will vary based on item size and SKU count. Please contact your CALA F&L specialist for a storage estimate based on collection size. The information required for an estimate is: SKU Count & Type Total Item Count

      • 10% Fulfillment Fee: As part of CALA's fulfillment offering, we provide customer service to your customers for orders that we're overseeing. To support that service, we add 10% to your monthly fulfillment bill.

      Please note that the information below are estimates, and that actual charges will vary based on factors such as order size, inventory amounts, item size, packaging specifications etc.

      • Pick (first item): $2.39
      • Pack (any additional items in the order): $0.59
      • Storage (per Cubic Feet): $0.45*
      • Receiving: FREE**
      • Special Projects (per Hour): $37.00
      • Value Added Services (Optional): $TBD Optional Capability to perform special packaging such as wrapping items in tissue paper, arranging items in box, etc.

      *The first 100 units of a given SKU are billed at 4x the literal volume, and the remainder at 1.5x to account for inventory complexity at scale.

      **Select few warehouses in the CALA network may charge an hourly fee for receiving. For the majority of our partners, receiving is not charged for.


      Example of Charges For a B2C order:

      1 t-shirt shipping to a customer in the United States:

      • Pick/pack fee: $2.39

      • Generic Packaging: $0.15

      • Shipping label cost: $5

      • Total: $7.54

      Note that the above is just an estimate/example, and actual outbound shipping prices will vary based on the origin/destination of the shipment.

       

      Fulfillment Billing:

      CALA works with you to set up your E-Commerce store to collect the proper amount of shipping from your customers. This means that any funds that you collect from customers for shipping are deposited into your account.

       

      CALA pays our fulfillment warehouses directly on your behalf in order to fulfill orders to your customers. Every month we will send you an invoice for your fulfillment costs to store your inventory, and send orders to your customers.

       

      While the amount that you collect from your customers for shipping may not perfectly match your fulfillment bill, CALA's goal is to work with you to set up your shipping collection methods to match or slightly exceed the cost of fulfillment. Your CALA Fulfillment and Logistics Specialist will estimate your monthly storage, and outbound pick/pack/ship fees based on your collection size, and the average size of the items in that collection. Your CALA F&L Specialist will then work to adjust your E-Commerce shipping settings to collect the appropriate amount from your customers, whether that is working with you to establish retail prices for your items that build-in shipping, or setting up rules to charge customers shipping at checkout. Check out our article on Offering Free Shipping vs. Shipping at Checkout.

       

      E-Commerce Integration

      When your customers place an order on your website, it is our job to fulfill that order and send the items to your customer. In order to do that, we integrate your website with the warehouse that their goods are stored in, so that the orders are automatically transmitted to the warehouse, and the warehouse ships the goods to the end-customer.

      Currently, we support the following E-Commerce platforms:

      • Shopify

      • Webflow

      In this article, we have covered the specific costs that are associated with fulfillment when you are participating in a plan that includes CALA Fulfillment. Please see here for our pricing plans.