Even as online business continues to grow, with nearly 23% of retail purchases expected to be digital orders by 2027, newer online ventures can face challenges staying successful.
Scaling a business across multiple platforms requires strategizing for multiple concerns: supporting a consistent customer experience, managing inventory and order fulfillment, and maintaining different systems across platforms. Navigating these challenges can prove expensive and time-consuming, especially for a growing business.
Looking to take advantage of an expanding global home organization products market, Zen Storage was founded in 2023 in Guang Zhou, China. The company has built its success on delivering high-quality home storage and organization products in the US across multiple ecommerce platforms. Zen Storage first started selling on Amazon in 2023 as its primary channel, but in early 2024 began expanding the business to emerging channels such as Temu and TikTok Shop, as well as its own direct-to-consumer (D2C) website.
Operating with a lean 13-employee team, the company initially struggled to efficiently scale their operations and faced growing pains when selling across multiple new platforms.
While at first hesitant to utilize Multi-Channel Fulfillment (MCF) — due to higher per-unit fulfillment costs vs. other 3PLs — Zen Storage decided it was worth transitioning a portion of their off-Amazon orders to MCF to see if this strategy could help them reduce their operational complexity and improve their bottom line. Additionally, as an Amazon seller with Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA) inventory, they could immediately start placing MCF orders in Seller Central without any additional registrations or long-term contracts.
With MCF, the company was able to take advantage of:
- Inventory optimization: Zen Storage consolidated its home organization product inventory into a single pool that can be used for all its channels.
- Integrated, automated fulfillment operations: Seamlessly connecting MCF with back-end systems allowed the company to automate the entire order process, reducing logistics complexity.
- Superior delivery performance: Inconsistent delivery times plagued the company, but MCF’s on-time delivery and fast fulfillment was a game-changer.
After using MCF to fulfill orders for its home organization products from August 2024 through March 2025, Zen Storage saw significant improvements across multiple areas of its operations:
- 50% time-savings in daily operations by eliminating the need to create separate inventory allocation and routing plans for individual sales channels
- 15% savings in international transportation costs by minimizing the number of ocean shipments required to maintain sufficient stock with a single logistics partner
- 30% reduction in total planned inventory as Amazon optimally distributes products in the right quantities across its extensive network of US fulfillment centers
- 5% lower storage and aged inventory costs from faster inventory turns
The time and cost savings speak for themselves.
After trying multiple alternatives, MCF ended up being the best fit for where our business is now. Yes, we pay more in fulfillment per order with MCF, but it also saves us from having to manage multiple inventory pools—and an entire extra ops setup—which was costing us ~20% of our margin.
Zen Storage chose Amazon Multi-Channel Fulfillment (MCF) to consolidate their operations and reduce complexity. As Zen Storage continues to grow, they’re working closely with Amazon to optimize their multi-channel sales strategy, focusing on reducing costs and improving delivery speed to meet the demanding requirements of various e-commerce platforms. Beyond the US, Zen Storage is also exploring using MCF globally as they look to bring their brand to additional international markets, such as the EU.
