It has long been recognized that the ability to provide fast delivery service and reduce customer shipment fee is essential to industries participating in e-commerce. When customer orders are made, the orders must be transferred to one or more fulfillment centers so that they can be later transferred to one or more serving areas. In order to minimize shipping costs and delivery time, it would be ideal to place the orders in a fulfillment center closest to the customer's ultimate shipping address. Today, however, most customer orders are made remotely from anywhere around the world. Therefore, with a limited number of fulfillment centers, it has become more challenging to determine where each product should be assigned for inventory placement.
While there is a common understanding that the inventory should be placed close to the customer in order to minimize shipping fees and delivery time, there has yet to be an efficient method for optimizing inventory placement. For example, even today, some companies store winter down jackets and snowshoes in warehouses located in Arizona, which is inefficient because it is less likely that there will be a high customer demand for down jackets and snowshoes in Arizona. As such, when customers order winter down jackets and snowshoes, it is more likely than not that the products will need to travel a longer distance, thereby increasing the delivery time and the customers' shipping costs.
Attempts have been made to provide systems and methods for managing inventory placement that reduce delivery time. For example, U.S. Pat. No. 7,987,107 describes systems and methods for end-to-end fulfillment and supply chain management that has ability to an item to a customer within a delivery timeframe. In order to ensure that items are delivered within the delivery timeframe, the system determines the geographical location associated with the customer and places the item in a shipping warehouse that is nearest to the customer's geographical location.
However, these conventional systems and methods are time-consuming because the customer's shipping location must be determined for every customer order. Therefore, it may be impossible to place products in one or more fulfillment centers prior to receiving a customer order for those products. In addition, many fulfillment centers have restrictions that allow only particular products to be stored in those fulfillment centers. Therefore, it may be difficult to find a fulfillment center that both meets the requirements for each product and is nearest to the customer's shipping location.
Therefore, there is a need for improved systems and methods for managing inventory placement. In particular, there is a need for improved systems and methods for managing inventory placement that has ability to minimize delivery time and shipping fees while obviating the need to determine the customer's shipping location for each product before assigning the product for inventory placement in a fulfillment center.