How to Improve Performance of Your E-commerce Growth

During the Covid-19 pandemic, we have seen the retail environment change dramatically as the lockdown curtailed a lot of retail activity and those that continued scrambled to get online.

Retail outlets have stock levels to meet short term demand fluctuations and allow the efficiency of resupply.

Supply warehouses maintain supplies to allow fluctuations in supply from both local and overseas suppliers, economies of scale, and to enable the restocking of Retail outlets.

As companies investigated and implemented e-commerce, they faced the decision where to carry out order fulfilment. Should it be carried out through retail stores or centralised fulfilment from the supply warehouse?

The retail approach respects the ownership of retail outlets where this is a factor, but as was found, the store must be "open" to fulfil and historically there can be duplication of functions.

When centralised fulfilment occurred, this can utilise the stock in the warehouse, but they are not designed to handle single units or small orders, which leads to reduced ability to scale up.

The suggested solution would be to incorporate a retail order fulfilment "retail" outlet associated with the Supply Warehouse, tailored to the requirements of retail. Resupply is carried out from the supply warehouse.

This approach allows optimisation of the e-commerce B2C solution that is,

• Scalable - introduce a system to handle 80% can move to 100% and use extended hours to handle peaks.

• Scalable - allows increasing in-store volume or an increased variety of goods.

• Efficiency - through increased accuracy,

• Flexibility - same day, next day, economy, providing variable pricing and service.

Centralised order fulfilment may require additional capital investment in software, computer hardware and in transporting devices. (see Logistics Robots, 6 Components needed to get Started .

John Biggs. has spent the last 20 years selling and installing ERP systems. Logistics robots are a logical extension to provide improved efficiency and accuracy. For more information www.hikrobot.co.nz. Or email john.biggs@hikrobot.co.nz, LinkedIn