advantages of outsourcing to such companies are: facilities (in early stages of business development you may have no place and money needed to store your items), shipping costs (because of special shipping rates when you ship thousands of items, which is not available for small companies), shipping materials costs (same reason as before), fulfillment costs (beneficial pricing when all fulfillment activities are bundled in one order), e-commerce (fulfillment houses use advanced e-commerce systems to help in management).