Gartner® Hype Cycle™ for Retail Technologies, 2024
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As customers clamor for features like same-day delivery, curbside pickup and BOPIS, the ability to maintain high inventory accuracy and manage stock across multiple stores from a centralized system becomes increasingly important. To attain this, retailers need solutions that are designed to enable and support omnichannel fulfillment using all of their inventory, whether it’s in a warehouse or sitting on the shelf at location 15.
With a B2B retail SaaS solution, stores can unlock omnichannel fulfillment capabilities and manage them through a singular system. There are numerous benefits to this strategy, but here are three of the most important:
One of the biggest problems with using multiple apps for omnichannel fulfillment is inventory data discrepancies — if the application you use to fulfill BOPIS orders isn’t pulling information directly from your in-store inventory management system, you’re going to have a bad time. If a store’s website claims an item is in stock and then it turns out it’s not there, you can’t buy it, a situation that approximately 78% of Americans encountered in 2023 according to Retail Dive. For retailers, every one of those instances marks a lost sale. By utilizing a SaaS solution that keeps near-real-time track of your inventory, you can eliminate this problem almost entirely.
Buy online, pickup in-store (BOPIS) ship-to-store (STS), ship-from-store (SFS) and similar offerings are a must to stay competitive in today’s retail environment. These features can be difficult to offer because order fulfillment for most retailers is still happening at fulfillment centers or warehouses. However, if you can reliably track the inventory at all of your stores (see above), there’s no reason that you can’t leverage your store stock for the same purposes. If you handle it properly, you can make every store a microfulfillment center, which turns conversations from “I’m sorry, we don’t have that at this location” to “I can have that sent to your house.”
Once you have a solution in place that connects your in-store inventory to fulfillment, you can start offering these services to your customers, boosting the customer experience.
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An often overlooked but extremely powerful advantage of leveraging omnichannel fulfillment software is the ability to not only sell on multiple channels but also to provide returns and exchanges across them. One of the worst things about handling a return as a customer is having to go back to the location to hand off the product. If your omnichannel fulfillment is handled by a unified system, they can simply send it back through the mail or handle the returns process at the nearest location, improving customer satisfaction and creating a better customer experience. Think about how Amazon returns work — you can drop the items off in a locker or send them back in whatever box you have handy, which is part of why people love to shop with them.
By keeping track of all your fulfillment data in one application, you can make it relatively easy to enable cross-channel returns and exchanges while also streamlining your returns process — as soon as the item is returned, the system is aware that it is part of your inventory again, and it can be quickly returned to the shelf or shipped to wherever it’s needed.
Omnichannel is the new normal for retail stores. Choosing to ignore that your customers like to shop in a variety of ways is choosing to lose sales. By using a solution that enables omnichannel fulfillment, you can set your stores up for success now and in the future.
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