Ship-from-store
The principle behind this service
More and more retail companies are launching ship-from-store services, which involve delivering a product ordered online from a store. According to a recent study by the Altavia group, 20% of retailers use in-store stocks to make these deliveries, and the service is expected to account for between 10 and 20% of French e-commerce by 2020. While it may seem simple to activate for the consumer, who receives his or her item without always knowing whether it comes from a point of sale or a warehouse, its implementation is more complex for retailers. First of all, they need to standardize their inventories by aggregating web inventories with all in-store inventories to form a single virtual stock. The retailer will then be able to broaden its offer by offering items from the network's stores for sale.
An optimal tool
This ship-from-store tool, combined with an order orchestration solution (OMS or Order Management System), uses predefined scoring and algorithms to determine which stores are the most suitable for preparing orders, either because they are closest to the delivery location, or because they are overstocked, or because they are capable of handling an entire basket made up of several products. OMS, which bridges the gap between retail and ERP, WMS and TMS tools, provides a global view of all these stocks, including those in warehouses, and proposes the most optimal solution, at the best cost, tailored to the retailer's objectives. In this age of omnichannel strategies, ship-from-store is an excellent way of satisfying customer expectations while boosting sales.
