As companies look at 2012 they continue to see that Retail is becoming more competitive. There are now new ways to sell such as expansion of websites, opening new stores, some are looking at "Marketplace" programs and others are participating in "Flash-buy" initiatives to gain the customer loyalty. For those considering these, are in the process of implementing them, or are new to what these methods are all about, this article may be of some interest to you.What does it mean to expand to other websites?
It may seem pretty obvious to many of you, but for those who have one website and may be satisfied with your success of that website, I recommend considering what others are doing in this space. We can all agree that the average consumer is making increasingly more of their purchases online. And with more and more retailers moving to an E-Commerce model, consumers have a multitude of choices to make these online purchases. So how do we improve our odds of winning this business? One way is to have multiple websites/URL's where the consumer can see their favorite product brands; however the processing of those orders are still managed by your organization.
What is a Marketplace program?
As an alternative or addition to creating and managing your websites, more retailers are partnering up with other "Premier" on-line E-tailers in what is referred to as Marketplace. With this relationship you partner with other online sellers for space and even services/links to or for your company, to sell your products. In some cases, the Premier online partner simply provides a link to your website, whiile others may provide fulfillment services to your customers or manage the "order taking" leaving you to manage fulfillment.
What is a Flash Buy program?
This is yet another method of selling products to the masses. Many use the social media networks such as Facebook to advertise their one-time offer to consumers. Others have an internal consumer network for this same function. Depending the Retailer, some gather up customer orders and then send a PO to the supplier for a bulk order to their DC, and still others send customer orders as they occur to the supplier, thus supporting a drop ship model.
Enacting any of these initiative will mean changes to internal support, and a change in the customer experience. Each of the above will require automation of the order taking and fulfillment of the consumer order and the branding needed to maintain customer loyalty. This may mean setting up -
- a data feed for new items into your item master
- a link or process to manage the Digital Images/Assets
- a data feed for receiving consumer orders from another partner
- setting up a drop ship arrangement with your supplier community. Supporting Branded Packing slips per selling site or mechanism (managing the different URL Brands). Perhaps you'll need a data feed for the shipment confirmations
- if fulfilled with your own distribution network, managing the Branding for the consumer experience will mean changes internally for you.
In order to truly manage the volume and the efficiencies needed to support these, there must be some type of electronic trading. Are you prepared? Do you know which of your trading partners already do these logistically and systematically? If you're opening new stores, are you asking for new store discounts? Is the store automated to receive the influx of supplier orders as you build the store inventory?