With order fulfillment, transparency and accuracy are highly sought-after traits. There's the potential need to incorporate cost information, timing, and inventory information. With this information, you can optimize logistical delivery and inventory management. By doing so, you’ve got the closest locations that have the inventory in stock sending the needed items to the recipient, essentially creating the most optimized delivery. By optimizing inventory management and shipping you are about to get the best rates, and in turn, the best turnaround times for the end users.
The consideration for fulfillment starts with the concept of how the business is going to handle fulfillment, if it's going to do any kind of drop shipping or multi-location fulfillment, and what information the consumer is going to need or want. A lot of marketplaces will allow folks to see data on inventory information and lead times for item shipment and delivery times. In addition, incorporating accurate cost information for shipping enables the user to choose between the various shipping options without having to build in a large margin. If the shipping information is accurate, then it's possible to give accurate total costs.
Without that level of data visibility, your marketplace would be less competitive to another marketplace that might have more accurate information. Another cost to consider with shipping that is typically incorporated is dimensional weight. The length, width, height, and depth of an item plus its actual weight. Without considering both the size and weight of an item, it's possible to give inaccurate shipping costs which can be a big component of the total cost that a user is going to be budgeting for.