Omni Channel Fulfillment Software

As businesses continue to grow into the 21^st century, so do the ways they sell their products. While many “pure play” retailers exist, the number of multi-channel, or omni channel retailers continue to grow rapidly.

Instead of focusing only on traditional sales channels, such as face-to-face, via the phone, or through a catalog order, many small and mid-sized distributors and online retailers are embracing additional and/or alternative avenues, like web stores, eCommerce platforms, and EDI trading.

Different channels have different requirements and workflows but ensuring a cohesive experience for the customer regarding fulfillment is a unifying priority when it comes to omni channel management. Often, businesses offering a blend of sales channels struggle with streamlining online and EDI order and fulfillment within their operations, and this can hurt customer retention, sales, and growth. For customers, an optimal experience when it comes to fulfillment, including shipping costs, delivery speeds, and company responsiveness, is what prevents “cart abandonment” and increases retention rates.

A comprehensive study, “The State of Shipping in Commerce,” conducted by Temando details the struggles retailers face when it comes to omni channel fulfillment, more specifically, online sales. While the study focuses on web store and eCommerce sales, the methods for optimized fulfillment still apply. In 2017, 54% of shoppers indicated they abandoned their purchase due to shipping costs being too high, while 39% abandoned due to no free shipping options, and another 26% to lengthy delivery times.

When it comes to company responsiveness, such as providing tracking information, 96% of shoppers want accurate delivery estimates and only 51% of retailers offer it. Ease and affordability of returns also correlate to a consumer’s opinion of a company’s response – 43% of shoppers stated they would shop online more if more retailers offered free and simple returns. Overall, multi channel retailers who optimized their fulfillment operations and offered more choices to their customers experienced a 45% growth in sales and saw a 39% improvement in customers’ satisfaction with their shopping experience.

Acctivate for Optimizing Omni Channel Fulfillment

Optimizing your fulfillment operations is achievable when you focus on 3 key areas: lowering costs, quickening order processing and fulfillment, and responsiveness. Implementing a solution such as Acctivate to automate and centralize your fulfillment operations provides the tools and knowledge to optimize these key areas.

Omni Channel Fulfillment & Lowering Costs

Automation and centralization for any small to mid-sized distributor or online retailer enhance visibility and help streamline operations, identifying and providing a detailed view of operational costs that can be cut or lowered. When it comes to lowering fulfillment costs, integration with your choice of shipping carriers and the ability to easily review changing rates is beneficial. Acctivate’s Shipping Workstation allows a business to integrate with individual carriers, as well as shipping solutions like StarShip and ShipStation, eliminates double data re-entry with automatic order information population, and offers the ability to manage and track an unlimited number of products. Easy access to carrier rates, requirements, and updates lend insight and control to keep your costs low, and in turn, allow you to offer more shipping options and lower costs to your customers. When it comes to EDI, the customer is not an individual, but rather a big box retailer like Target^®, Walmart^® or Home Depot^®.  Acctivate’s EDI order management and shipping solution lowers operational costs, automates tasks, and improves logistics – all of which are extraordinarily beneficial to your supply chain.

Quick Omni Channel Fulfillment

Customers, whether an individual, another small business, or a big box retailer, all have the same level of expectation for their omni channel experience. They want cheap shipping and dependable, quick delivery times. Ensuring fast omni channel order fulfillment requires enhancing your warehouse with an order management system and barcoding tools to quicken fulfillment. 

Acctivate’s Order Manager streamlines omni channel order processing by automatically syncing web store & eCommerce orders into Acctivate, and offering one click EDI order importing from big box customers. The order manager helps to provide the best online customer experience by continually updating to make sure a customer can’t put an unavailable item in their cart and by offering real-time credit card processing. Acctivate’s Barcoding & Mobile enables additional omni channel fulfillment operational improvements. Implementation of barcoding and mobile devices into your fulfillment operations quickly provides the benefits of improved accuracy, cost savings on formerly time-consuming tasks, and overall improved warehouse efficiency. With barcoding, inventory can be located and traced, regardless of location, and orders can be quickly picked and packed. Barcoding and mobile capabilities also offer multiple pick route options, dramatically reduce human errors, and order/delivery information is available for printing of labels during packing.

Omni Channel Fulfillment & Company Responsiveness

A customer wants transparency and easy access to service, regardless of the channel. The ability to provide order status & tracking updates through Acctivate’s Shipping Workstation keeps customers up-to-date and confident in their ordering experience. With Acctivate’s order manager and barcoding, you can offer rapid order fulfillment, another example of company responsiveness. With these three features in place, returns are simple, and a representative can quickly respond to customer questions with detailed customer and order history a couple of clicks away. Overall, swift fulfillment and responsive service is conducive to higher customer retention rates, growing your sales and strengthening your company’s reputation.