Recent Articles
Automate Your Shipping Refunds
Did you know that more than $2 billion dollars of shipping refunds go unclaimed annually? Shipping costs are typically the 3rd largest line item on the P&L behind merchandise and labor cost. For most e-commerce merchants, 10% of their sales are spent on costs related to shipping. Given the number of dollars spent by your business to ship products to your customers, monitoring your shipments, and invoices is important to your bottom line. With this being said, shipping managers typically have one objective...to fulfill orders and quickly. Because of this, they have little time to assume responsibility for additional workload. How do they meet the ever present deadlines to ship orders plus review previous shipments to ensure that they were delivered, much less arrive on time? There is a business solution for the commonly faced pressures faced by shipping managers to fulfill orders as well as meet customer expectations. If your business ships with FedEx or UPS, consider taking advantage of a refunds and invoice auditing company allowing your business to focus on shipping orders, not claiming due refunds and credits. Select
Why Omnichannel is Critical for Retailers: Customer Interaction Optimization
Part 3 in a 3 Part Series | Part 1, Part 2 Freestyle Solutions partnered with the e-tailing group to do independent research to understand how mid-market retailers are addressing omnichannel in terms of process and technology. Rather than surmise what the experience would be like, we developed a hands-on mystery shopping research study where visits to 25 retailers would reveal the hard results. Our methodology involved a pre-store setup that considered two types of shopping experiences: buy online pickup in-store and place an order for return at a retail location. Customer Interaction Optimization In our study, we found that the retail associates universally processed returns via the POS and only in one instance was a second associate required to complete the transaction, so this process was smooth. However, retailers regularly miss an opportunity to turn returns into revenue. As retail employee attrition is all too frequent, technology rather than training should be available for consultative selling opportunities to impact the top line. While it is difficult to replace the experience of a stellar sales associate, retailers need systems to
Why Omnichannel is Critical for Retailers: Inventory Transparency
Part 1 in a 3 Part Series | Part 2, Part 3 Freestyle Solutions partnered with the e-tailing group to do independent research to understand how mid-market retailers are addressing omnichannel from a tactical execution standpoint in terms of both process and technology. Rather than surmise what the experience would be like, we developed a hands-on mystery shopping research study where visits to 25 retailers would reveal the hard results. Our methodology involved a pre-store setup that considered two types of shopping experiences: 1) buy online pickup in-store (BOPIS) and 2) place an order online and return it at a retail location. Inventory Transparency For retailers, inventory rightsizing and turnover are two of the most important key performance indicators measuring the health of their stores. This is in direct conflict with customers who are no longer patient and want the products to be at the store when they arrive. With less than half of retailers allowing for this expected access, coupled with the convenience of BOPIS, an inventory foundation is fundamental to success. There is work to be done where
Why Omnichannel is Critical for Retailers: Information Accessibility
Part 2 in a 3 Part Series | Part 1, Part 3 Freestyle Solutions partnered with the e-tailing group to conduct independent research to understand how mid-market retailers have adopted omnichannel from an execution standpoint in terms of process and technology. Rather than surmise what the experience would be like, the e-tailing group developed a hands-on mystery shopping research study where visits to 25 retailers would reveal the hard results. Our methodology involved a pre-store setup that considered two types of shopping experiences: buy online pickup in-store and place an order for return at a retail location. Information Accessibility Shoppers come to the store for many reasons and customer information access is at the core of a convenient shopping experience. Today, securing this information is not a smooth process. The dependency on the customer to provide an order receipt, given antiquated systems, is simply not shopper friendly. Every retailer must be able to access an order based on a multitude of search criteria. After 20 years of ecommerce, consumers are at the point where they feel this issue should have been resolved. During
The OMS of the Future
When you’re looking at the landscape of order management in retail, you can’t help but see a paradigm shift both in technology and best practices happening right before your eyes. You can’t walk into a mid-sized or large retail store without being told you can do business with them online, via mobile app, or through social media. Omnichannel has already arrived. This shift was fast. Retailers had just finished embracing multichannel eCommerce, and now find the industry has firmly moved on to omnichannel. Unlike multichannel, where the focus is on channel selling only, omnichannel impacts every part of your business, including multichannel selling. It wasn’t so long ago that multichannel selling through shopping engines, social media and even marketplaces challenged retailers to expand their sales reach, track sales on all their channels, keep tabs on customers’ orders, and ensure that their multichannel strategy was growing revenue. For most multichannel retailers, the order management system (OMS) was a small actor in a larger picture where the focus was heavily on optimization in selling channels and marketplaces, as well keeping the shopping
An Important Update for M.O.M. Customers
To all M.O.M. customers: I’m excited to announce the latest versions of our Multichannel Order Manager (M.O.M.), SiteLINK and BizSync products. Based on feedback from our customers, these software releases contain impactful new features that will help you grow, secure, mobilize and streamline your business. In 2016, retailers cannot take enough security precautions to protect customer data. Even smaller businesses find themselves and their customer data the target of malicious hacks and fraud as well as being assessed penalties and fees from their merchant banks for not meeting the latest PCI standards. We invested significantly in updating M.O.M. 10 to comply with the latest Payment Card Industry security standards (PCI PA-DSS v.3.1). For our retail customers, we added omnichannel capabilities for buy online pick-up in store (BOPIS), buy online return in-store (BORIS), and ship from store to provide consumers with a seamless shopping experience. In addition, we added integration with leading marketplaces and shopping carts while increasing efficiency of the current tasks conducted in M.O.M. today. As you know, Google changed their search rankings last year, heavily penalizing web sites