I live in a small, rural town and recently purchased 28,000 square feet of building for a very good price. I'm looking to position the property for an out-of-town business to utilize and create some new jobs in my area. There are no local businesses with a need for this property.

The property is a former middle school in the Midwest, but due to declining enrollment the district closed it down last year. I really believe it would make an amazing fulfillment center for an ecommerce site(s).

I don't run an ecommerce site and am not sure what site owners would be looking for. I'm certainly not going to be able to compete with high-tech fulfillment centers that have been in business for decades. However, I do have a lot of building (that is fully wired with ethernet) that I can use very cheaply. Local labor is very cheap, and very nice state payments are available if $12/hour jobs are created (a great job in my area, and can attract some very good employees).

What is important to ecommerce sites in terms of outsourcing their warehousing and picking/packing/shipping? I'd say a service with the lowest price and lowest errors?

Any generic advice for positioning myself to offer that to someone?

What about additional services on top of the order fulfillment... say inbound/outbound calling, etc?

What do you look for when your ecommerce site becomes larger than a one-person operation?

Thanks.

What is important to ecommerce sites in terms of outsourcing their warehousing and picking/packing/shipping? I'd say a service with the lowest price and lowest errors?


Among other things big ecom companies look for the cheapest shipping costs. The area in which their warehouses are located is supposed to have good roads, should be near a major airport hub and big carriers like FedEx, DHL and UPS must be more than willing to pick up packages from that area at competitive prices.

What about additional services on top of the order fulfillment... say inbound/outbound calling, etc?

A lot depends on the quality of locally available manpower. If yours is a small rural town, then chances are that people from bigger towns may not be willing to move to your town. People, especially well educated people, mostly like to move to big cities with more job opportunities and better infrastructure instead of small towns. Is your town located near any major city and within the driving distance for prospective employees? If yes, then that will be a big help.

Most likely this is gonna be a long term project for you and a lot of patience will be required. If you can make it work then the jobs that it will bring to your small town will help a lot of families.

Consider wholesale storage / warehousing in addition to / instead of e-Commerce fulfillment. My brother works in distribution for a large national retailer, and while they need to be able to handle volumne, there's much less worry about individual orders, which means less manpower necessary, but more space. They need their warehouse to be reasonably close to major arteries, since the distance from the major expressways can have a huge impact on travel time and therefore shipping costs, but FedEx and UPS and the like are not important at all, because they simply hire a fleet of trucks that travel directly between the ports and the warehouse, and the warehouse and the retail stores.

A well-wired space could also be good for a call center (telemarketing, customer support, whatever), or possibly a datacenter.