Fulfilment Warehouses for Online Sellers in Uzbekistan: What to Check

An online seller, whether on a marketplace such as Uzum, in a Telegram shop or on his own site, often hands his stock to a fulfilment operator. The operator stores the goods, picks and packs each order, ships it and takes the returns. From that moment, the operator's count is, in practice, your stock. If it is wrong, your listings oversell or sit idle, and you pay storage for goods that are not on the shelf. A seller who lives in another country and has never seen the warehouse is exposed twice over. The questions below are worth asking before you send the first pallet.

Questions about receiving

• How are inbound goods checked: by piece, by carton or by pallet label only? Who signs the receipt?
• Within what time do you receive a receiving report, and does it include photographs and a note of any damage?
• How are differences between your shipping list and what arrived recorded, and who tells you?
• Does the operator use your own item codes and barcodes, or does it give goods its own? If it does, who keeps the mapping?

Questions about storage and accuracy

• Are your goods kept apart from other sellers' goods, in marked locations, with your name or code on the labels?
• How often does the operator count its stock, and how does it measure accuracy: by lines, by units or by value? Ask for the definition and for the latest result, and be cautious of a bare percentage given without either.
• May you attend a count, send a representative or commission an independent check?
• What are the arrangements for goods that sit unsold for a long time?

Questions about returns

Returns are where online stock most often goes wrong, because every returned item arrives in a different condition. Ask where returns are taken, how quickly they are inspected, and into which categories they are sorted: resellable, damaged, to be returned to the supplier. Ask whether you will see photographs of damaged returns, whether resellable ones go straight back into the available count, and what happens to returns that no one claims. If these answers are vague, returned goods will blur into your sellable stock.

Questions about reporting and claims

• How often do you receive a stock report: daily, weekly, on demand? Can you download it, and does it split available, reserved, damaged, returned and in-transit goods?
• Can the report be reconciled with the figures on your marketplace dashboard, and who explains the differences?
• How are loss and damage claims handled, up to what limit, and within what time must you report them? Take the written terms to your own legal adviser.

Ask to see a sample of each document: a receiving report, a stock report and a returns report, with other sellers' names removed. A good operator can show them at once and answer specific questions. A weak one offers assurances. The quality of the samples tells you more than any brochure, and a visit to the warehouse, in person or through someone you trust, tells you more still.

An example (conditional figures)

You send 2,000 units. The operator ships 1,350 orders and takes back 80 returns, of which 62 are resellable and 18 are damaged. Your own ledger says: 2,000 minus 1,350 plus 80 gives 730 units physically present, of which 712 are sellable and 18 damaged. The operator's report shows 730 "in stock", without a damaged line. The total agrees, but the marketplace is told that 730 units are available, so as many as 18 orders may be accepted that cannot be fulfilled. The first question to ask is therefore not "is the number right?" but "what is inside the number?"

Ask for the split by status in every report from now on, and reconcile it with your own ledger once a month. A ledger kept by you, from your own shipping and returns documents, is the one yardstick that does not depend on the operator.

In short

A fulfilment warehouse can serve an online seller well, provided its counts can be trusted. WarehouseDepo carries out an independent count before you hand over stock and at agreed intervals afterwards, and matches the result with your own records and your marketplace figures.