Shipping from Stores A Must for Multichannel Stores

As businesses expand into further channels, new possibilities keeps opening up of delivery of goods. For example, if a customer has placed an order on the e commerce platform and a retail store is much closer to the delivery area than the warehouse, the goods are better delivered directly from the store as this will take less time. Otherwise, the delivery from warehouse would take the usual time and the customer will be happier because of fast delivery.

Irrespective of the fact, whether the customer is on the e commerce platform of a small enterprise or that of a giant business like Amazon, she looks for the same level of service, range of products and shipping. Customers prefer free shipping; and they want delivery to happen fast which is what businesses should strive to provide.

Delivering from store fetches high speed coupled with low cost. Target and Walmart have taken steps to ensure that the delivery reaches to customer as soon as possible. In fact, there are so many Walmart stores in America that 90% of the population would be having a Wal-Mart within 10 miles. Walmart is rightly using these stores to deliver products to the customers who ordered online. Shipping from Retail Stores helps utilizing the product of one store (where it has become redundant) to where the demand is.

While shipping from stores, the business needs to ensure that the stores should have space for packing tables, packing materials etc. Employees also need to learn packing and delivering goods and to ensure a balance between the needs of shoppers in the store and the demand because of online orders. Inventory Management of the Store needs to be revisited to incorporate the Shipping from Store concept. Also the fact, that generally the Store would be at a place where the real estate rates are high compared to the location of a warehouse. It needs to be considered that the extra price which is paid for managing the goods at a store does not outnumber the benefits which shipping from store brings.