5 step guide to implementing Ship from Store

 

“Out of Stock” listings and long delivery windows are guaranteed to drive customers away from your online shop. With Ship from Store you can overcome this issue by using your brick and mortar stores as active fulfillment centers.

What if you could expand your warehouse and speed up your deliveries without having to invest in new premises and costly carrier services? Good news – you can!

By implementing Ship from Store you can utilize your brick and mortar stores, associates and SKU range while reducing ‘over’ and ‘out’ of stock items in the warehouse.

You can also save on shipping costs by fulfilling orders closer to your customers and generate more in-store footfall with your own click & collect PUDO offering.

With these 5 steps you have a solid plan for setting up Ship from Store in your business:

1. Integrate your systems
   Integrate your ecommerce, warehouse management, ERP and delivery management systems to ensure that your systems work together instead of independently. That way you don’t waste time typing data into different systems manually, which increases the risk of mistakes being made. Also, your employees don’t have to learn how to use new systems. Instead, they can work in just one system, which automatically exchanges data with your backend systems.
2. Speed up delivery at a lower cost
   By shipping orders directly from stores, there are more opportunities for you to fulfil orders. This reduces “out of stocks” and enables you to provide a much better delivery experience for your customers. By shipping directly from store, you can ship orders closer to your customers speeding up the delivery and most likely at a more favorable cost.
3. Build your own delivery service
   Building your own delivery service, allows you to use your own store employees or setup a dedicated team to deliver online orders. And you don’t even have to invest in expensive hardware to do this. With Scan App from Consignor you can scan parcels, send status updates, optimize delivery routes and much more.
4. Use multiple carriers
   Don’t limit yourself to only one carrier, as this results in a loss of flexibility and a resignation to annual rate hikes and service limitations. Consignor contains the world’s largest carrier library, and you can connect to new carriers in just a matter of minutes. This allows you to meet your customers’ different delivery expectations whether you are utilizing 3rd party network carriers or your own delivery service.
5. Track and trace
   When your fulfillment expands to include ship from store, warehouses and maybe even 3PLs and others, offering accurate track and trace information becomes complicated. Through a cloud based portal, Consignor keeps track of orders wherever they are in your supply chain, allowing your employees an easy and fast way to track any customer order and enhance the customer service experience. Also, personalized notifications can be sent to your customers based on key events during the delivery journey to keep them informed every step of the way.

This article is the second in a series of articles around the Digitization of Brick and Mortar stores. You can read our previous article “Use your online shop to evolve your brick and mortar stores” here.

Download our free e-book to learn how to evolve your brick and mortar stores with Consignor for Retail.