The war for customers is on and traditional retailers are joining the fight. In a bid to get products to customers at break neck speed, brick and mortar retailers are offering a ship from store option. To do this they are converting their back rooms to mini-distribution centers.
Already, roughly 10 – 15 percent of online sales from brick-and-mortar stores are currently being picked up from stores. How will this emerging ship-from-store approach impact the larger landscape of retail distribution to win over customers?
Customers are becoming increasingly demanding and seeking instant gratification from the products they purchase. We live in a society where customers have more choice than ever to have their order fulfilled. With retailers expanding their capabilities to include ship-from-store, (or access a service like Shyp to do it for them!) customers are getting more convenient options at checkout and quicker delivery as purchases have less distance to travel to reach their final destination. Warehouses and distribution centres will no longer ship individual customer orders as this will be shifted to retailers who are often better equipped to handle these orders in addition to saving the customer time and money on shipping.
At ShipEarly, we do retailers a favour – we actually obtain the sale for them to turnover their inventory. When a retailer signs up and opts to share their real-time inventory data, product vendors have the ability to sell a retailer partners merchandise for them via e-Commerce. ShipEarly is an omnichannel eCommerce application that allows a product manufacturer to sell the merchandise on behalf of their traditional brick-and-mortar retail partner. At checkout on a product manufacturer’s eCommerce page, customers simply select which retailer they want to fulfill the order and by which method; ship-from-store or in-store pick-up.
Some of you might be asking why would a product manufacturer want to give up a full margin eCommerce sale to a retail partner? We recommend you check out our whitepaper, Building the Case for Retailer Integrated eCommerce.
