Top Tips for Successful Ship-from-Store Fulfillment
With online sales continuing to grow at double-digit rates, retailers are looking for innovative solutions to improve their customer’s experience as well as minimize costs.
By Ryan Germann
A trending strategy is the implementation of ship-from-store (SFS) fulfillment. This fulfillment model benefits brick and mortar retailers by improving speed-to-customer, capitalizing on existing retail store inventory, and reducing costs associated with fulfillment, such as shipping. Cost reduction is at the core of this fulfillment strategy, and it is imperative for retailers as price wars are waged through online marketplaces.
Time to Embrace the Cross-Channel Experience
By focusing on cross-channel customer experience, brick and mortar retailers also leverage their distinct advantage over pure-play e-commerce retailers – their stores! This advantage is not only in the physical store experience, but also in the opportunity to use the locations as mini-fulfillment centers.
Challenges Implementing SFS? If this implementation feels daunting to you, you’re not alone!
Read the full article to learn 6 tips to be stellar at Ship-from-Store fulfillment:
http://parcelindustry.com/article-5102-top-tips-for-successful-ship-from-store-fulfillment.html
This article originally appeared in the March/April, 2018 issue of PARCEL.
Mind Blown; Now What?
Hopefully you pulled a couple of pointers away from this article to consider as options for improving your SFS fulfillment strategy. Start off by getting input from your store employees – not the managers, but the actual packers. How can you make their activities easier, more efficient, and repeatable? Next, order a number of sample packages from your different locations to see what the unboxing experience is like. Is it consistent? Then, make some new friends. Other retailers, industry professionals, and vendors can all offer additional perspectives on challenges. SFS fulfillment is constantly evolving, and your process should as well.
