Why Order in Store and Ship From Store are must-haves if you’ve got wide product ranges
Order cancellations are a growing problem, so if you’re a retailer facing challenges linked to the depth and width of your product ranges, then Order in Store and Ship From Store solutions are tailor-made for you. In this article, we’ll explore what these technologies are, how they can help you, and how they’ve already helped many retailers just like you.
What are Order in Store and Ship From Store?
In case you’re not familiar with these solutions, here’s a quick explanation of what each of them can offer:
Order in Store is the Store to Web solution that expands your store catalogue by offering your customers access to ecommerce inventory in-store. When a customer can’t find an item that they are looking for; because the item is sold out in-store or the store doesn’t stock that item in the specific colour or size; the store associate simply needs to consult their tablet, smartphone or any in-store terminal, and place the order for their customer. In this way, the customer can have the item delivered directly to their home or a store of their choice. This allows retailers to considerably improve in-store customer experience, infinitely expand their range and not miss out on a single sale.
Ship from Store is a tool that allows you to ship web orders directly from your store stock. Thanks to stock unification, there is a significantly increased availability as items that are out of stock in the warehouses, but still available in certain stores can still be shipped to web customers’ home address.
This helps keep customers happy while drastically reducing the number of unsold items and resulting end-of-season markdowns. This win-win solution also helps you reduce your carbon footprint whilst simultaneously speeding up delivery times. Indeed, shipping items from the stores closest to the customers will not only reduce the item’s mileage and carbon emissions but may also allow the shopper to receive their item in a shorter timeframe than if it was sent from the central warehouse.
How Order in Store can help you?
Now that we’ve gone over that quick reminder, let’s see how Order in Store can help you if you have a particularly wide or deep product range. To illustrate this point, let’s say you’re a lingerie retailer. If you sell lingerie then chances are you’ll have anywhere from 30 to 50 sizes for some products and that’s without considering all the different colour options. As such, it’s near impossible that all your stores can stock all products in all sizes and colours all of the time. This may lead some shoppers to feel discouraged when they continuously struggle to find their size.
With Order in Store, you’ll be able to significantly improve customer satisfaction by helping them find the item they want, even if it is located in your warehouse or another store. The shopper will still be able to make a purchase in-store and will simply receive the item at home or in-store. This expansion of your stores’ catalogue is made possible thanks to stock unification and OneStock.
And not only will your customers be happy, but you will be too as this will also help to improve your bottom line. ba&sh, one of our iconic fashion customers, saw a 10% increase in turnover within the first month of implementing this Order in Store solution!
How Ship From Store can help you?
If we consider that with very wide product ranges all stores can’t have all sizes or variations of each item, chances are they nonetheless have certain items that they struggle to sell. For example, a lingerie store may struggle to sell very small or very big sizes and be left with many unsold items that will end up being marked down at the end of the season, resulting in significant margin erosion for the retailer. Thanks to Ship from Store, these items can be used throughout the season to fulfil web orders. Again, online shoppers will be happy to find the item they are searching for, and you will boost your web sales.
Our customer, RougeGorge Lingerie, saw their online product unavailability rate drop from 40% to under 20% after Ship from Store was activated in just a single store, and then down to under 5% once 120 of their stores had implemented the solution. Ship from Store now represents 27% of their ecommerce turnover. With those numbers, it’s hard not to see the benefit of such a great solution!
How Ship From Store is helping RougeGorge Lingerie
Watch this video to find out how Ship from Store has helped RougeGorge Lingerie!
If you’d like to find out how these solutions could help your business, get in touch now!
