Success Starts in Summer for Holiday eCommerce Fulfillment

Every year, retailers are feeling more pressure to stay ahead of the highly-competitive holiday retail market, which seems to be pushed earlier and earlier each year. With big box retailers feeling the pressure from more holiday shoppers turning to eCommerce, they are driving down prices and finding ways to integrate omnichannel and eCommerce into their brick-and-mortar strategies. This has caused a ripple effect for e-retailers that don’t have the convenience of a customer being able to find the item they need that day… Streamlined fulfillment is the key to making the online shopping experience as pleasant and convenient as in-store. Plus, no crowds!

The Most Important 4 Weeks of the eCommerce Year

With just around 30 shopping days between Black Friday and December 25th, the traditional end of the holiday buying season, fulfillment centers and warehouses are inundated with rush orders, heavy load days, large volumes at receiving, and managing manual labor. Quarter 4 can make a break a company’s revenue, as we all know, but it can also make a break a reputation.

What needs to be in place by Summer 2017 to achieve success this holiday season? Here’s a checklist of essentials for your order and inventory management system.

Seamless Shipping

Inefficient shipping methods not only eat into your bottom line, during holiday it can cause a bottleneck that is nearly impossible to recover from. Customers celebrating Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa and other gift-giving holidays have a hard deadline, with a lot of sentimental value attached. A lost or delayed order will cause not only loss of revenue, but loss of trust from that customer. 

A shipping management system that epitomizes holiday readiness should include:

• Integration with Top Shippers: Auto-integration with the top 60 shipping companies including DHL, FedEx, UPS, USPS and more.
• Shipping Price Comparison: See shipping costs comparisons per-order for each supported shipper.
• Intelligent Decision-Making: Automatically choose the lowest shipping cost, or pick the shipping company manually.

Fulfillment Optimization 

Abilities like in-store fulfillment and BOPIS used to be reserved for big box retailers with a large staff and deep pockets, but a platform like SmartStock360 can integrate with your physical to make this strategy work for your business, with no exorbitant additional costs for implementation of this capability.  

Essential Holiday Fulfillment Statistics: 

• Buy online, pickup in-store is now the second most requested fulfillment type, according to eMarketer.
• 8 in 10 internet users think buy online, pickup in store is appealing, reports eMarketer.
• Only 21% of US retail IT executives said they had up-to-date technology in place for in-store pickup or return of web goods, reports eMarketer.

Check back to our blog for additional posts from our holiday readiness series. If your OMS is lagging, or you aren’t confident it can provide you a revenue-driving holiday season… Now is the time to upgrade to a future-facing OMS that is customized for your unique company processes and workflows.