The Challenge
Retailers experience a constant growth in E-Commerce. To support this growth, there is a need for more fulfilment-capacity at the DC often causing a backlog during peak season and special promotions. This asks for large capital investments in the DC and the DC workforce. A ship-from-store strategy is far more cost-effective in reducing the workload at the warehouse.
The Solution
Avoid the need to invest more capital in DCs. Leverage your existing Retail stores by turning them into virtual DCs using a ship-from-store strategy. By connecting all your stores the workload is distributed evenly over all store staff. You will capitalise the downtime staff hours, increase your margins, have less markdowns, and no more broken size-/product ranges on your digital channels. Ship-from-store made easy!
Making the digital inventory available everywhere
Catching lost-sales though kiosks and tablets
Supports Kiosks, Tablets and Phones
Great handling of E-Commerce returns
Extensive Business Intelligence reports
Handling E-Commerce returns with ease.
The Retail Unity Service Applications is a tool designed to handle returns fast and in an ideal matter. The moment a consumer returns a product the store employee is able to service the consumer with a wide range of options. It could just be a regular return. In this case the solution is able to monitor the return reason.
A more charming solution is when the consumer didn’t like the colour. Or the size was not right. With only a few clicks a new digital order is created. The consumer leaves with a new order confirmation instead of a refund.
On average this solution will cut your refunds with 16% !
Free replenishment during the season.
The ‘demand score‘ of a product in the Retail Unity software is a figure calculated by analysing the POS turnover, in-store sales kiosk turnover, and E-Commerce turnover in the store capture area. This figure is an indicator of the most ideal location for a specific product in any selected timeframe.
The solution uses this information to add additional products to store-to-store shipments. As these shipping costs are made anyway (the consumers have to receive their products) you can regard this as free replenishment in the shortest timeframe possible. Even without the products moving through the warehouse!
The conversion at your stores will improve significantly while the operational expenses at the warehouse are lowered.
Returns as replenishment for the stores.
Returns that are sent back by the consumer through the postal services have also been optimised for Retail. The Retail Unity solution selects the ideal store for each return. Either at the moment the order is shipped to the consumer by adding a return label, or the moment a consumer reports a product for a return on the E-Commerce channel. Based on the contents of the return, the ideal store is selected in which the returns can be seen as replenishment stock. This means the returns will immediately go to the location in which they are most likely to be sold again!
This will significantly lower the workload at the warehouse. At the same time the conversion in the stores goes up !