Facing the busiest online sales period to date, eCommerce businesses clearly need to prepare for the issues that peak times inevitably create.
By Michael Brown, the Pre Sales Consultant at Venda
Online trading has become an increasingly vital part of holiday shopping over the last decade and this year, demand is expected to be higher than ever. Indeed, the IMRG predicts that online takings will break through the £10bn barrier in December, with Brits dedicating an estimated 400 million search hours looking for gifts over the entire Christmas period.
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One core element that traditionally causes problems during Christmas trading is order fulfillment, an effect often caused through lack of planning and forward-thinking strategy. Here’s how digital retailers can optimise their delivery strategies to match the high demand of the season:
1) Integrate your online service with your physical store
Click and Collect is the process of ordering a product online and picking it up in-store. The IMRG claims this accounted for 16% of online sales for multichannel retailers this year, something that has become particularly fruitful for supermarkets in recent years, as Tesco’s simple step-by-step procedure demonstrates below.
With Click and Collect, customers can instantly purchase items online and pick them up minutes later at their local store. It provides an added level of convenience to shoppers and creates a fast and fluid order system for retailers, encouraging consumers to visit both the online marketplace and physical store.
2) Get it there on time
Whilst order fulfillment sounds like the simple process of choosing an item from a shelf, packing and then distributing, it can be logistically challenging.
Depending on the scale of the business, a great first start is choosing an experienced third party logistics partner, such as DHL, FedEx or UPS (referred to below as a 3PL). Selecting a respected partner over a conventional logistics model can save time and money as well as reduce risk when entering unfamiliar territory.
An experienced third party service will ensure that a customer’s order is picked up, packaged to correspond with a specific brand, and dispatched in quick time. With tracking information sent to both retailer and customer, there is constant visibility on what stage an order is at and it will advise the receiver on when to be home if required.
3) Don’t go it alone
One step further from third party delivery, ‘drop shipping’ offers an added level of convenience to both the retailer and the customer. Customers purchase their desired product as normal, but instead of the retailer keeping goods in stock, the manufacturer or wholesaler ships goods directly to the customer.
In most instances, the end customer will not be aware that their order is being fulfilled by a third party, so the connection with the retailer remains intact.
Furthermore, by going directly through a wholesaler, stock availability is significantly increased and delivery is made much quicker, keeping customers satisfied.
The need to tie up money in stock holdings is also removed because the distributor owns the stock and the retailer only pays for the service once a customer has confirmed and paid for an order. With RRP significantly higher than wholesale value, this is a fantastic method to maximise profits at peak times of business.
4) Secure your relationship with the customer by facilitating a smooth return
As a retailer or brand, a system needs to be in place to allow for a seamless return of products, which contains the appropriate screening for damages, faults and replacements and prepares for fraudulent activity. Guidelines for customer service also need to be in place with a general mentality that ‘the customer is always right’.
In the UK, retailers within the apparel market will likely receive returns of forty per cent in January, making reverse logistics a key component of a successful ecommerce business. If a pre-structured system is in place to deal with these occurrences, the relationship between the brand and the customer will be maintained.
For more visit: www.venda.com
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