Expand your assortment with inventories of partners
No more lost sales
The challenge for retailers is to prevent any lost sales. This means that the total online and offline stock should be available on the shop floor as well as in the web shop. If a consumer cannot find a product in the store, he can directly place the order through a touchscreen, smartphone or the tablet of the sales clerk and pay. Since such a portal can accommodate many products, retailers can easily extend their ranges with products that are not normally in stores. These products may come from the e-commerce DC or via drop-ship directly from the supplier.
Better margins
In the U.S.A., we see that major retailers Macy’s, Sears and Wal-Mart are successful with ship-from-shop. Macy’s claims that the company is converting sales floor in department stores to storage space to enable efficient handling of consumer orders. Stores change into mini-warehouses from which orders are picked on behalf of the webshop and the stores. By shipping orders, in particular, from stores that are overstocked, retailers get better margins since fewer products are marked down in end-of-season sales.
Same day
Furthermore, ship-from-shop is a run up to same-day delivery. Retailers can deliver consumers on the same day from a local store, something which is not possible in the current distribution networks of parcel carriers. The rise of city distribution in the Netherlands will play a major role in this field.
Opportunities for retailers
Opportunities for retailers are:
- Fewer lost sales in stores and on the web
- Higher margin by limiting mark-downs
- Wider (virtual) product range
- Less obsolete stock
- Lower inventory levels
- More satisfied customers
