Recent Articles
Does Your POS Know Who Your Customer Is?
A customer walks into a store to return a pair of shoes. The store associate asks for a receipt, the customer hands them an email confirmation from an online purchase. These shoes were purchased on line, shipped from warehouse inventory, not sold in the store from the store inventory. How do you manage the return of an item that was bought online but is being returned to the store? How do you manage updating your inventory? Can your point of sale system (POS) access the original purchase and customer record to make the return, and perhaps exchange process, seamless for the customer? Does your POS know who your customer is? What if you don’t have the correct item to complete the exchange in the store but the customer saw it available in your online store? Do you let them leave the store with the risk that they never complete the purchase? How can you ensure that your customers can transact with you anytime they want, on any device, in any location? A recent study from the e-tailing group found that
Not Your Father’s Order Management
Order Management has come a long way from the golden age of catalogers. Back in the 1980’s, pre-Internet, there were two sales channels catalogers needed to worry about: the phone and mail-in orders. Today, order management systems (OMS) need to work with every retail channel, or omnichannel, in order to be the central repository for all customer purchases, not just orders. This requirement has been propelled by growing consumer expectations generated by a paradigm shift in the way they shop. In addition, retail executives are looking for the OMS to reduce the number of systems necessary to manage orders, inventory, products and customer information. The Omnichannel Opportunity Omnichannel is now a reality as many retailers have started initiatives to unify their sales channels for optimizing the customer experience. Consumer facing sales channels such as the web, call center and store-systems must all have access to the same retail data for shopping and service consistency. Across many retail verticals, it has become important to have the ability to view inventory values across different stores or even warehouses to get the right
Best Practices for Implementing Omnichannel
Omnichannel may be the latest buzzword, but it’s more than just a passing fad. Omnichannel technology is the infrastructure that enables retailers and online merchants to give today's customer the shop-anywhere, ship-anywhere, pick-up or return anywhere behavior they demand. The previous generation of technology that many of today’s businesses rely on consists of numerous disparate systems that were not designed to operate together. Today’s leading edge retailers and online trend-setters have replaced those systems with omnichannel-capable new systems. Now you need to do the same thing to remain competitive – but how? Step one is to recognize that while omnichannel is complicated it still relies on the same principles that have built your business – satisfying your customer’s needs. You don’t have to reinvent your business. You have to adapt it to the shopping behavior of today’s customer. This requires sponsorship and ownership from the top of the organization – the owner, president, board of directors, etc. Step two is to recognize that the key to omnichannel success is that your sales and fulfillment technology infrastructure needs to have enterprise-wide
Discounting Your Promotions Strategy: Promotions Strategies of the Future
With the economy still not at peak performance, apparel retailers went to the old standby this past holiday season, discounting. We all know that, if not done well, this promotions strategy can quickly erode margins and add little value to the customer, especially loyal ones. For the online channel, free shipping (the oldest promotion used in eCommerce) was still at the top of the heap this past holiday season. Customers have come to expect free shipping, especially for orders of significant value (over $100). If you're like many retailers, you'd like to stop this practice of giving customers free shipping all together. Free shipping decreases margins and, in many cases, can't be used alongside other more attractive promotions for both the retailer and the customer. Avoid offering free shipping as a site wide promotion; it limits your options due to double-dipping on promotions that will ultimately shave your margins. Moving forward, retailers must implement a comprehensive promotions strategy to maintain a high level of consumer satisfaction toward their brand. Savvy retailers know their promotions strategies must be innovative, creative and
5 Tips to Help Retailers to Prepare for the Holidays
It's July, so if you're a retailer, it's time to start preparing for the holiday season. Freestyle Solutions is here to help online retailers and brands survive and thrive during the busy season. Below are some tips that will help your business this holiday season. Prepare Your Website Is your website ready for the traffic spikes the holidays can bring? Testing load time for API’s and your site’s speed is a good idea before the holiday season. If you collect customer data or accept credit cards online, you’ll want to verify your site is PCI compliant. The Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) is a set of security standards designed to ensure that all companies that accept, process, store or transmit credit card information maintain a secure environment. Is your website secure? Make sure your ecommerce and content management platforms have the latest updates installed and are using best security practices. If this is beyond IT team’s area of expertise, you may want to hire a security consultant to verify your website is not vulnerable to an attack. Businesses are frequently
Why is Omnichannel so hard?
Today, retail executives struggle with omnichannel demands and expectations. According to a report from Retail Dive, only "21 percent of retail executives are more confident now than a year ago about their company’s ability to deliver omnichannel services". The challenge of implementing omnichannel capabilities is so hard for many reasons. The shop-anywhere, pick-up anywhere, ship anywhere, return anywhere expectations of today’s shopper drives demands on the infrastructure of retailers and ecommerce merchants like never before. Here are just a few of the challenges facing today’s mid-sized retailers and ecommerce merchants: Technology Retailers and merchants need to get different systems that were designed to operate autonomously to now interact seamlessly, as if they were one comprehensive system. Examples are many, such as warehouse management systems (WMS), designed to manage and track product procurement, receipt, storage fulfillment and shipping now needing to interact with mobile point-of-sale (POS) systems. This type of integration was never needed in the past. The POS only needed to manage the products physically present in one particular retail location, and manage the sale transaction and process the payment for