Four Best Practices to Make the Holiday Season Bright — with Convenience
With the rise of multichannel retailing and a saturated retail market, today’s customers expect to find the products they want, when they want and in a way that is most convenient to them. Be it via speedy delivery, in-store pickup or traditional store visits, shoppers today want to be connected to their purchases quickly. Retailers that don’t provide such services will be outperformed by competitors that do this Christmas season.
According to Shopatron research, delivery times directly impact a brand or retailer's Net Promoter Score. They found 87% of shoppers will promote a brand if their orders are delivered within 5 days or less. Yet despite this immense opportunity, some retailers are missing out due to a fulfillment strategy that is inefficient, untimely and costly.
Below are four best practices to ensure retailers enjoy a holly jolly 2015 holiday season:
Give the Gift of In-Store Pickup
According to Forrester Research, 70% of U.S. online consumers have said they use buy online, pickup in-store to some degree, with 5% of them stating they use it every time they make a purchase with an in-store pickup enabled retailer.
For many shoppers, the holidays are a busy season packed full of activities, with little time to spare on full-day shopping trips, battling crowded store aisles. The convenience of in-store pickup will set you apart and consumers will see you as a time-saver.
Let’s take the scenario of the last-minute holiday shopper: They have likely waited too long to place an order, and is worried about getting the shipment in time. This shopper has a few options: place the order online and hope for the best, brave the frenetic holiday crowds at the nearest store, or simply place the order online and drive to a nearby store where the package is awaiting pickup.
The in-store pickup option takes the “waiting and worrying game” out of the shopping equation, combining the ease of online shopping with the speed of local fulfillment. For local retailers and dealers, in-store pickup encourages more foot traffic to stores, enhances relationships between brands and retailers, and between retailers and customers, as well as converting more sales.
Shopatron’s research has shown that 40% of shoppers make extra purchases once they arrive to pick up their order.
Make it Merry with Ship-From-Store
Too often, order fulfilment through distribution centers or warehouses sets customers up for disappointment; they are inconvenient to shoppers’ actual locations resulting in longer shipping times and higher shipping costs.
Additional Shopatron research has revealed that 47% of retail dealers are closer to customers than warehouses or DCs. As such, ship-from-store is a highly efficient solution for retailers and manufacturers because it allows them to better optimize their dealer or store networks and ship from every possible storefront available.
Ship-from-store also eases the burden of the warehouse seasonal employee frenzy. According to Forrester Research, warehouse square footage and associated pick-and-pack staff for seasonal peaks that last just a few days of the year is a major investment for any retailer.
The opportunity to offload some of the workload from existing web fulfillment locations and spread this load across hundreds or thousands of stores can reduce temporary worker costs, potentially remove the need for investment in fulfillment center expansion, and reduce customer support volumes by reducing fulfillment center backlogs.
It’s important for retailers to mindfully select which stores they dedicate as ship-from-store locations. Typically, most store locations can be used for this type of fulfillment, but retailers may want that to change during the holiday season. ‘ With differences in staffing, inventory levels, seasonal foot traffic, operational capacity, and physical location, each store’s capability to fulfill online orders varies. By grouping and prioritizing your fulfillment locations to match your business needs, you will fulfill orders faster as well as improve operational efficiencies and inventory turn.
Spread Holiday Cheer with Local Product Visibility
Now more than ever, consumers utilize online product research, whether via a mobile device or desktop, to influence the shopping decisions in the early phases of their shopping journey, long before they ever walk into a store. If a consumer does not know if a local store has the product they are looking for in stock, they may be less inclined to make the time and effort to drive to or call the store to find out.
By showing shoppers what is available in stores via local product availability, retailers can increase purchase-intent foot traffic into those locations. According to Forrester Research, with visibility into in-store inventory, online shoppers now have the opportunity to purchase from a retailer when online inventory is out of stock but the item is available at a nearby store.
In today’s retail reality, the responsibility falls to the retailer to break down the walls dividing offline and online channels; separate buckets of inventory must be collapsed into a single view of enterprise inventory from which the customer can shop.
Deck the Halls with Store Associates and “Save the Sale”
No matter where a customer is shopping, in-store or online, knowledgeable and helpful store associates must be available either in person or as chat boxes online to answer any pre-sale questions. In-store associates equipped with “save the sale” technology, including endless aisle capabilities adds a higher level of service to the shopping experience and sets a retailer apart from the competition.
“Save the Sale” gives customers immediate access to inventory outside of what’s available on store shelves and eliminates the hassle of searching store after store for a product. According to Forrester Research, endless aisle capabilities allow retailers to meet customer expectations, maximize the use of store real estate, deliver incremental revenue, and retain margin by selling through at-risk inventory.
With the holidays quickly approaching, retailers must be ready with a winning distributed order contingency plan that gives customers the service they not only expect, but demand. Want a successful holiday season wrapped up with a big red bow? These four omnichannel capabilities are the key to making the season bright.