Warehouse Management and Warehousing Services
Generally located near major transport links and located in industrial areas, a warehouse is built and equipped to facilitate the logistics of goods/items/products of all sizes, often in freight containers, or stacked on pallets. It is a commercial enterprise and warehouses are holding spaces for products and items coming in, going out, and stored for a given period of time.
A warehouse helps to process, wash and manufacture to order, which allows warehousing procedures to run smoothly. As a result, warehousing services are performed correctly, resulting in a satisfied clientele. You can get a number of warehousing services that go hand in hands, such as logistics, road, sea and air transportation, and freight forwarding.
In a warehouse, you will also find inventory control and goods consolidation services. A warehouse will help you in providing general merchandise warehousing services to give short-term flexibility. These warehouse management services include record keeping, preparation of variable cost structure accounts and distribution of finished goods. Kitting, pick and pack and labelling operations are also included.
For the various warehousing services to work effectively, there needs to be consistency in the supply chain.
Several companies will offer you personalized attention as a customer. Their warehousing services are geared to meet your particular needs. Other companies act as third-party logistics integrators who find different special offers and choose suitable practical partners to offer customized and flexible supply chain solutions. These types of warehousing companies offer freight bill auditing, export processing, industry updates, and distribution planning and optimization.
Transportation Services and Modes of Transport
In human evolution, the earliest means of transportation were walking, running and swimming. Before the Industrial Revolution and modernization, water transport was the most efficient method of transporting large quantities of goods over long distances, although it was very slow and expensive. The importance of water transport led to the growth of cities along rivers and seashores, where ships, canoes and boats could dock.
The domestication of animals and the invention of the sled gave way to the first animal transport services. Horses and oxen were used as early as 3000 BC to transport goods and people and moved along dirt roads. Later civilizations, such as the Mesopotamian and Indus Valley civilizations, built paved roads to facilitate transportation.
Modes of transport
A “mode of transport” is a method or solution that uses a particular type of infrastructure, operation and vehicle to transport people and cargo. A mode can be used on its own or in combination with other modes; in this case it is referred to as “intermodal” or “multimodal” transport. Each is distinct from the other and is used depending on factors such as the cost of transport, the route is taken, capacity, etc.
- Human-powered transport is the most common in developing and underdeveloped countries due to several factors such as cost savings, site accessibility, physical exercise and environmental reasons. Human-powered transport is a sustainable form of transport and has recently been improved with the use of modern machinery and technology – e.g. cycling, skating, rowing, skiing which are extremely useful in difficult environments.
- Animals can work alone or in teams, such as mules, horse-drawn carts, dog sledges, etc.
- Air: aeroplanes and airships have considerably reduced travel times and are the fastest mode of transporting passengers and goods. High costs and high energy consumption are the drawbacks of air transport; however, it is estimated that more than 500,000 people travel by aircraft at any given time.
Creating an Ecommerce Website
Selling products online requires a very different setup than a run-of-the-mill blog site. Let’s take a look at the things you’ll need to keep in mind when creating an eCommerce website and help explain why they cost more to design.
First let me tell you what we’re not going to cover in this article.
We are not going to assume that an e-commerce website is a single web page with some PayPal button codes inserted into it.
PayPal buttons are great and work great for those selling a handful of items, but we are taking e-commerce to the next level and giving the customer a better online shopping experience.
Most modern e-commerce websites are apps. They have a user interface, and administration settings, store data in a database and follow a process workflow. Let’s touch on some of these areas.
The Basics
An e-commerce website can be thought of as a play with actors acting out their scenes.
The main actors in an e-commerce website are:
- The customer – buys products
- The website owner – ships the purchased products and receives payment.
- The e-commerce application – the interface between all the actors
- The payment gateway – manages the payment transactions (more on this later)
- The merchant/company bank account – the website owner’s bank account (more on this later)
