16 Feb
What is Omnichannel eCommerce Fulfilment?
Omnichannel retail (also known as omnichannel commerce) is a multichannel sales approach that focuses on providing a consistent customer experience regardless of whether the customer purchases online or in a physical location.
Ecommerce businesses must aim to improve customer experiences and sustain better relationships as our customers are accessing numerous channels and platforms from a variety of devices.
Omnichannel fulfilment is a technique in which organisations fulfil and distribute client orders over several selling channels. Within omnichannel, it integrates channels and inventories to streamline the fulfilment and delivery process.
Why should businesses have omnichannel ecommerce fulfilment?
Omnichannel ecommerce fulfilment make it easier for businesses to manage inventories and makes the shopping experience easier for customers, resulting in increased customer satisfaction and more sales for your company.
According to Investp, omnichannel ecommerce fulfilment is becoming the primary driving factors of future shopping experience. 89% of customers return to organisations with strong omnichannel strategies in place.
Shopping customers would like to have best customer experience with competitive price therefore omnichannel fulfilment is a powerful business tool that can help increase customer satisfaction and retain loyal customers.
Omnichannel Fulfilment Services:
The omnichannel fulfilment service involves the following steps:
1. Warehouse Organisation
Orders are filled in real time during this procedure. Unlike traditional fulfilment methods, these additional channels offer much-needed flexibility, ensuring that your consumers get what they want, when they want it, while keeping you in compliance with your vendors.
2. Order Management
This step involves receiving the order and confirming the order. This step is important to ensure the stock is available to be dispatched to the customer.
3. Pick & Packing
All the orders will be picked and packed with care to ensure the items are delivered to the customer is the expected quality and condition.
4. Dispatching & Returns
Orders are dispatched with a reliable courier. It is important to choose the best delivery service for the customer to ensure the customer is getting the most cost-effective and speedy service.
Customers are more than likely to purchase from you when there is a returns policy in place. Any returns are dealt in a timely manner to ensure customers receive their refunds.
5. Customer Communication
Customer communication is a vital element of providing a strong customer service. Keeping customers notified of their shopping experience will increase their loyalty and improve their shopping experience.
Benefits of omnichannel ecommerce fulfilment
Ecommerce businesses are more than likely to develop new business opportunities using omnichannel ecommerce fulfilment. The reason is because shoppers will have access to a wide range of options.
There are many benefits of omnichannel ecommerce fulfilment including:
Increased Order Efficiency:
Omnichannel ecommerce fulfilment makes the shopping experience so much easier as it streamlines multiple of channels into a single process. As a result, leads to increase efficiency, more accuracy in the delivery process and a seamless shipping system.
Enhances Customer Expectations:
Utilizing an omnichannel system provides a consistent shopping experience for the customer across all channels. The different shopping channels makes it convenient for the customer to purchase your products.
Customers expect a speedy and smooth delivery service, therefore proper quantity and timely delivery is critical as they influence the buyer’s shopping experience. Omnichannel fulfilment enhances customer’s expectations providing them with the best services, at the best price and the quickest delivery service.
Increased Accuracy in Reporting:
An omnichannel ecommerce fulfilment will manage all your channels and provide real insights on how the different channels are performing. Your business will have access to the reporting that will highlight your best performing channels and also indicate which channels need improvement to enhance the best shopping experience for your customers.
Increased Brand Awareness:
Omnichannel ecommerce fulfilment will enhance the brand image of your organisation. If your business is consistent across all the shopping channels, your business will differentiate from competitors who that have yet to embrace omnichannel distribution.
Challenges of Omnichannel Fulfilment:
Inventory Management can be Difficult:
Inventory management can be extremely difficult across the different channels.
It’s easy to double (or triple) count SKUs and units when selling the same physical product(s) through several channels. Businesses must consider the different buying patterns, shipping speeds, and overall demand to maintain stock levels, reorders, and inventory forecasts across sales channels.
The ability to effortlessly mix the same SKUs from different stores in a unified fulfilment platform is critical for avoiding overcounting and complicating inventory management.
Lack of Resources & Knowledge:
If you don’t have the appropriate resources and knowledge, implementing and launching an omnichannel strategy can be difficult.
Order management is an important element in running a smooth and lucrative business which requires knowledge and resources. Because of the many variables at play in an omnichannel system, determining the dispatch method is difficult; this can result in backorders, dissatisfied consumers, and expensive expenses.
You can always invest in an omnichannel ecommerce fulfilment centre. An omnichannel ecommerce fulfilment centre will provide your business with the technology and specialist team to take over the process for you.
Want to Outsource Omnichannel Fulfilment?
Implementing omnichannel ecommerce fulfilment will provide your business with competitive advantage. It can be challenging to implement this strategy without the knowledge and resources in place, that’s why 3PL like Meteor Space can manage your omnichannel fulfilment to relieve the stress and allow you to focus on your core business!
Contact Meteor Space today to find out more about Omnichannel Fulfilment!
