Web order fulfillment has become one of the most important aspects of running a retail operation. Whether you see your Web store as another channel of your retail chain, a part of your overall retail business, or a separate business altogether, you still have to grapple with how it’s done.
First, you have to consider your efficiency needs. Profitability is directly related to business efficiency.
Here’s what I mean: If you have to shuffle your product from a store to a warehouse and to a separate shipping dock just to fulfill a Web order, that can get costly real quick when you think about all the touchpoints of one particular product. Wouldn’t it be more efficient to store Web products in a section of your warehouse and mail directly from there?
That’s just one question you have to answer about your Web store operations.
ChainDrive allows you to manage your product lifecycles by product name and SKU as well as by vendor name. You can assign conditions and track inventory on multiple levels with just one tool.
You can also manage your promotions and your product prices through the same tool. You can have one price for in-store merchandise and another price for your Web store.
There are special sensitivity issues you run into with running a retail business on the Web that are not considerations for brick-and-mortar businesses. For that reason, you can set up exceptions that allow you to manually check orders before you fulfill them. For instance, if a customer requests special shipping arrangements or doesn’t fill out your customer information completely, then you can flag those orders in real time and deal with the issues head on.
ChainDrive’s Web Order Fulfillment component makes running an e-tail operation easier.