Make Omnichannel Fulfillment Your Competitive Advantage & Brand Differentiator

Omnichannel fulfillment offers businesses the ability to fulfill orders from anywhere in their network, including warehouses and stores, by providing inventory visibility and availability across channels. To accomplish this requires synched data across different sources and solutions to offer a streamlined view of inventory and orders. Omnichannel fulfillment is very different from a traditional fulfillment model, where orders are filled from a single warehouse with little room for flexibility and the inability to maximize the retailer’s resources. In contrast, an omnichannel fulfillment model provides the optimal options to complete an order by maximizing strategies and resources.

There are multiple benefits that omnichannel fulfillment offers businesses, including:

Reducing inventory costs

Omnichannel fulfillment requires synchronization of data, which provides businesses additional insight into how much inventory is needed at any given time. This prevents overstocking, minimizes markdowns and reduces stagnant inventory taking up space on warehouse shelves.

Customer satisfaction

In today’s fast-paced retail environment, customers expect to get the correct product in a timely manner. Late deliveries and incorrect orders can quickly drive down customer retention, causing profit losses. Omnichannel order fulfillment ensures that customer orders are fulfilled correctly and in a timely manner, thus increasing customer retention and overall profits.

Real-time reporting

Omnichannel fulfillment enables monitoring of fulfillment center and warehouse performance quickly. Real-time accurate reports provide key insights into performance metrics.

Increased revenue

The ability to distribute products across multiple channels enables organizations to target new market opportunities, increasing sales and profits.

Enhances brand reputation

Utilizing multiple distribution channels to deliver orders accurately and quickly helps your brand stand out to customers in a sea of competitors.

Omnichannel flow paths refer to different order flows across an omnichannel environment, including:

Buy online, pickup in store (BOPIS)

Customers purchase online and choose their desired store to easily pick up their order. This gets the product into the customers’ hands at a much faster rate. It also helps lower operating costs for the company.

Curbside Pickup

Customers purchase online and pick up their order from the store in a contact-free fashion. 

Dark Store Fulfillment

Organizations fulfill online orders in dark stores or micro-fulfillment centers without interruptions to customers.

Ship from Store

Optimally leverage store associates and on-hand store inventory to fulfill from the store while reducing fulfillment costs.

Dropship

Dropship is a cost-effective order fulfillment model that allows retailers to help eliminate fulfillment and inventory issues by utilizing a dropship vendor to process online orders for customers quickly and efficiently. 

Omnichannel order fulfillment is a strategy with a multichannel approach to selling. It allows consumers to experience a seamless purchase experience. Implementing an omnichannel fulfillment strategy requires integrating back-end processes like distribution, communication and inventory channels to fulfill orders most efficiently. Getting the most from your enterprise requires embracing the various channels from which order fulfillment can occur.

Maximizing where orders are fulfilled is how your company can reap some of the biggest savings by investing in omnichannel solutions. Assessing the easiest method to get items to customers comes down to the quickest and most inexpensive route. These routes can be a retail store, vendor, DC, 3PL or in-store pickup. Any of these options can be used to deliver some items efficiently to customers, so long as thresholds are in place to manage inventory and available labor. Using these routes in situations that reduce your company’s costs and increase the speed in which customers receive their orders betters inventory allotment, reduces shipping costs, and removes obstacles associated with limited fulfillment options.