FULFILLING THE PROMISE OF OMNICHANNEL COMMERCE
Chain Store Age recently sat down with Stefan Weitz, chief product and strategy officer of omnichannel commerce and service provider Radial (formerly eBay Enterprise), to discuss how retailers can offer a seamless experience and have a successful holiday.
What is the biggest challenge retailers face when trying to enable omnichannel?
In many cases, it’s thinking they can do omnichannel by themselves. The reality is that getting omnichannel right, from order processing to delivering the product to the customer’s door, takes 17 and 21 steps — and every step has to be done correctly to just meet increased consumer expectations.
If all this is in your core competency, that’s great. But for a typical mid-sized retailer, it isn’t. So it’s vital to find the right partner who can help you ensure omnichannel success.
How can retailers and brands compete against Amazon?
The brick-and-mortar store can become a part of the digital customer experience. There has been a demographic shift, and millennials are rising in importance and spending more. By 2020, one-third of global spending will involve millennials.
Millennials are different than consumers we have seen in the past. They want a more personalized experience and to support brands that align with their values. They want more interaction than you get from clicking on a page. Retailers can let millennials research products online and then come into the store to actually touch and feel merchandise and talk to somebody about it.
Also, while brick-and-mortar stores have typically been used as a means of customer engagement, they can also be used as forward deployment delivery sites. Amazon has about 75 distribution centers across the country, which they can use for same-day delivery. But a mid-sized retailer might have 500 stores in place, and can use the store nearest the customer to fulfill orders. They can also get products delivered the same day, less expensively than from a distribution center.
How do you solve for fulfillment flexibility in terms of options, speed and price?
Shipping can take 6% to 15% of an order’s gross merchandise value. Retailers need to look at the mix of how they are fulfilling orders. Fulfilling from a distribution center provides huge economies of scale. You also have people on site who know how to pick and pack, and you get volume discounts from carriers.
But a lot of retailers fulfill the whole country with a single distribution center. This can work if it’s centrally located, but can cause problems otherwise. Retailers can and should leverage their store network, but it can be tricky without the right partner. It’s also important to understand how your customers want to receive the product — two-day shipping is not always a top priority or even desired.
What technologies does Radial offer that can help retailers compete this holiday season?
Radial has four key offerings. The first is our set of omnichannel technologies that allow retailers to manage enterprise distributed inventory and do things like profitably shift from state. A sophisticated order management system will know if an item should be shipped from a distribution center, drop-shipped or fulfilled from the retail store on the corner. Radial has the widely deployed omnichannel system with over 20,00 stores running on the platform.
Second, our payment, tax and fraud (PFT) technology platform allows retailers to accept payments from all over the world without worrying about also incurring fraud risk. Radial’s sophisticated machine-learning systems and 24/7 review teams determine if a payment is fraudulent or not, and if we get it wrong, the retailer has zero liability — we assume any fraud. We’re the only ones who can offer this level of service to retailers of all sizes, which is especially important as fraud is growing at 100% in 2016.
We also offer fulfillment and freight. We have 26 distribution centers all across the nation. We handle the logistics and the complexity so when a retailer is hit by something like Black Friday, their deliveries go out on time and without breaking the bank.
Finally, we also have a customer service offering with thousands of agents who can engage customers across chat, phone and email channels. Our customer-service representatives do far more than locate the order and tracking number. They are the brand’s best ambassadors and will walk a consumer through the entire purchase. For example, a customer may call and say, “I want to get a gift for my father — help me figure out what to get him.”