Category: Regional Utilization

Categories
Regional Utilization Smart Merchandising Warehouse Management

Riding the E-commerce Wave: Prepping for Peak Season Sales

The holiday season is the busiest time of the year for e-commerce brands. With the rise of online shopping, it’s more important than ever for brands to prepare for the peak season sale. In this article, we’ll discuss the steps you can take to ensure your e-commerce brand is ready for the holiday rush

Why Is peak season preparation important for e-commerce brands?

The holiday season is a crucial time for e-commerce brands to drive sales and revenue. In fact, according to Adobe Analytics, online sales during the 2020 holiday season reached $188.2 billion, a 32.2% increase from the previous year, and during the 2021 holiday season, online retail sales grew by 14.1% compared with the previous year.

With the increase in online shopping, it’s important for e-commerce brands to be prepared for the peak season to capitalize on the surge in sales. E-commerce brands must prepare for the peak season due to increased online competition and the need to meet high customer expectations to drive sales and revenue. This entails optimizing websites, offering attractive deals, and ensuring a seamless shopping experience, including timely shipping and easy returns, ultimately empowering brands to capitalize on the online shopping surge.

How to prepare your e-commerce brand for peak season sales?

Now that we understand the importance of peak season preparation let’s discuss the steps you can take to ensure your e-commerce brand is ready for the holiday rush.

1) Stock up on inventory

The last thing you want during the peak season is to run out of stock for your popular products. Make sure to stock up on inventory in advance to meet the increase in demand. Accurate inventory planning hinges on various factors, such as lead time, safety stock, planogram limitations, dynamic trends, and reorder thresholds.

Analyze your sales data from previous peak seasons to determine which products are most popular and make sure to have enough stock to meet the demand. You can also consider offering pre-orders for popular products to ensure that customers can still purchase them even if they are out of stock.

2) Ensure inventory accuracy across platforms

To ensure precise inventory and enhance customer satisfaction, deploy diverse inventory management methods. Begin by choosing a primary inventory management system, then seamlessly integrate it with various platforms. 

Many popular e-commerce systems provide APIs and apps for real-time cross-channel synchronization, a critical factor for multi-location sales. For further insights on streamlining warehouse operations during peak season sales.

3) Plan your pricing, promotions, and deals

Dynamic pricing during peak sales season is a savvy strategy to boost profits. It involves monitoring competitors’ pricing for similar products and adjusting yours to stay competitive. While this may entail occasional price reductions, it can also mean increases when warranted. 

Shoppers seek deals and promotions during the peak season, so plan and promote discounts, free shipping, and bundles in advance. Create urgency with limited-time offers and utilize effective merchandising solutions for pricing strategies and dynamic markdowns.

4) Prepare for shipping and fulfillment

During the peak season, shipping and fulfillment can become a bottleneck for e-commerce brands. Make sure to have a plan in place to handle the increase in orders and ensure timely delivery to your customers.

Consider a solution to help you optimize inventory distribution in a multi-warehouse network. Enhance proximity to customers, minimizing delivery time and logistics expenses effectively

Consider partnering with multiple shipping carriers to have backup options in case one carrier experiences delays. You can also offer expedited shipping options for customers who are willing to pay for faster delivery.

5) Streamline return management

Effectively managing returns is essential in the e-commerce business, especially as customers demand swift refunds and hassle-free return processes. This challenge intensifies during peak seasons, necessitating practical solutions. Utilizing software that allows sellers to record videos and streamline the SPF (Seller Protection Fund) claims process can significantly increase revenue and recoup losses from failed claims. Automate return procedures and offer convenience with curbside returns, ensuring a seamless experience for customers and retailers alike.

Other things to keep in mind

  1. Optimize your website– Your website serves as your brand’s digital storefront, making peak season optimization essential. Prioritize mobile-friendliness, quick loading, and intuitive navigation. Please do so during high-traffic periods to avoid slow loading, frustrating users, and losing sales. Test and enhance website performance in advance to guarantee a seamless shopping experience during peak season.
  2. Train your customer service team– In the high-demand peak season, a skilled customer service team is paramount. Training on products, policies, and procedures equips them to handle inquiries. Temporary staff can alleviate the workload, ensuring efficient customer support.
  3. Enable seamless cross-channel shopping behavior- Customers often navigate between online and offline channels. Only 10% start product discovery on a brand’s website. Retailers must ensure a seamless cross-channel experience, optimizing mobile apps and offering features like wishlists for in-store shopping assistance. Read more about implementing BORIS, BOPIS, and BOSS in the sales season. 
  4. Leverage technology– Technology is a game-changer for e-commerce in peak season. Personalize the shopping experience with targeted emails, product suggestions, and custom landing pages. Leverage automation tools for predicting inventory & sales, facilitating omnichannel, tracking progress, and return management.

Real-world examples of peak season preparation

Let’s look at how some successful e-commerce brands have prepared for the peak season in the past.

Amazon

Amazon’s Prime Day, established in 2015, serves as a paradigm for peak season sales strategy. Held twice a year, this massive online shopping event features exclusive deals for Prime members, driving substantial sales. Amazon, a global e-commerce giant, excels in peak season readiness, commencing preparations as early as a year back. They stockpile inventory and employ temporary staff to manage surging orders. Moreover, Amazon entices customers and enhances sales through special peak season deals, such as the yearly Prime Day sale.

Another example is BFL (Brands for Less) Group, UAE’s leading off-price retailer for fashion and homeware. The brand was finding it challenging to manage busy warehouses and distribution centers efficiently. To discover how BFL overcame peak season challenges with Increff’s cloud-based warehouse management system.

Who is responsible for peak season preparation?

Peak season preparation is a team effort and involves multiple departments within an e-commerce brand, like planning and merchandising, warehouse management, website team, etc. However, the responsibility ultimately falls on the e-commerce manager or director, who oversees the entire process and ensures that all departments are working together to prepare for the peak season.

Conclusion

The holiday season is a crucial time for e-commerce brands to drive sales and revenue. By optimizing your website, planning your promotions, stocking up on inventory, and leveraging technology, you can ensure that your brand is ready for the peak season sale.

Make sure to involve all departments in the preparation process and have a plan in place to handle the increase in orders and customer inquiries. By following these steps, you can set your e-commerce brand up for success during the busiest time of the year.

Remember, the right technology partner can help you achieve your peak season goals and pave the way for long-term success. Book a demo today!

Categories
Regional Utilization

Implement Regional Utilization to minimize logistics expense

As same-day deliveries become a norm, faster order fulfillment is now directly related to retaining customers or losing them. Hence it is imperative for brands to stock the right styles in the ideal quantities, matching regional demand requirements, to ensure fulfillment within the timeframe committed to the customers. 

Increff Merchandising Software, Regional Utilization module is the perfect solution to help you prioritize customer preferences and stock inventory near the buyer’s location to facilitate speedy deliveries.

Learn more about this tool and how it can help you reduce logistics expenses and plan the right distribution.

Start your free trial today. Click HERE

Categories
Regional Utilization Technology Warehouse Management

How Demand-Based Inventory Distribution Helps Future-Proof Your E-Commerce Business

As competition intensifies across the e-commerce space, brands must offer faster deliveries and efficient order fulfillment to stay competitive. Being able to project demand accurately and maintain inventory levels according to customer expectations is crucial.

A major factor influencing customers’ perception of a brand is the time taken by a retailer to deliver an item to their doorstep. Efficient and accurate order fulfillment has become key to building a strong e-commerce customer base, and it is equally critical for small and large businesses. While global brands/large businesses need to maintain their brand reputation and customer base, smaller brands need to build their customer base with perfect order fulfillment.

These trends are closely linked to demand-based inventory distribution and help brands create more efficient supply chains, ensuring better customer retention, brand loyalty, and soaring revenues.

The need for optimized demand-based inventory distribution

Optimized, demand-based inventory distribution allows brands to not just save on unnecessary logistical costs, but also avoid frustrating delays. It has helped brands save 10-12% on logistics and enhance overall margins by 30%. There are four main ways in which maximum regional utilization supports demand-based distribution:

  1. Faster deliveries: E-commerce customers these days expect same-day deliveries from brands. Storing items in the warehouse closest to the customers enables brands to fulfill orders quickly and maintain faster delivery cycles.
  2. Low rate of returns: Fulfilment delays are one of the major factors behind order returns. Demand-based inventory distribution ensures delivery of items within SLAs and reduces the rate of returns significantly.
  3. Splitting inventory smartly: Regional utilization allows brands to split inventory amongst warehouses in such a way that demand is always fulfilled from the nearest warehouses. Demand analysis is conducted at the pin code level and helps reduce order transit time, mishandling or damage in transit, and lower shipping costs.
  4. Cutting down on logistics costs: SKUs suggested by smart RU solutions are based on the best possible Pincode level warehouse-products mapping. The algorithm runs by processing data such as regional demand, warehouse capacity, and seasonality.

Tools to optimize regional utilization

Increff Distributed Inventory Optimization tool helps distribute inventory in a smart way to enable faster shipments at lower shipping costs. It enables brands and retailers to optimize Regional Utilization (RU) at the pin-code level in a hassle-free way. Since inventory placement services can be quite complex for brands with a high number of SKUs and low depth, constant demand analysis, and in-depth logistics planning are required. With this module, brands can leverage smart inventory allocation across multiple warehouses, and achieve higher regional utilization by warehouse fulfillment outsourcing locally. 

The role of distributed warehousing in demand-based inventory distribution

Distributed warehousing also known as cloud warehousing, allows brands to partner with third-party logistics (3PL) service providers, and rent warehouse space in different locations to stock inventory based on local demand. This provides several advantages to e-commerce brands including increased efficiency, reduced long-term rent, storage costs, shipping costs, and faster order fulfillment.

  • Distributed warehousing helps brands minimize risks in case of local emergencies such as fire or natural catastrophe. Having products located at various locations helps insure against such risks.
  • Distributed warehousing also allows you to enter new markets rather than be restricted to one region. As your capacity for fulfillment increases in a new market, all that is required is a marketing effort to establish a new customer base.
  • When a product is located closest to the customer, it is very likely that it appears with the highest ranking on a marketplace. This is because the speed of delivery is one of the heaviest weighted parameters for product ranking.
  • As you expand and start selling higher volumes across regions, the shipping costs from a single warehouse will exceed the cost of an additional e-commerce warehouse. Expansion across regions, therefore, necessitates distributed warehousing.

How cloud warehousing helps e-commerce businesses?

It helps brands avail outsourced warehouse distribution across geographies and benefit from higher visibility on the marketplace. Increff’s Cloud Warehousing service, for example, is an outsourced warehouse distribution service. This lies at the heart of smart inventory placement services through which brands can distribute stock to multiple 3PL warehouses across the country for better delivery to the end-consumer. 

Warehouse outsourcing benefits brands in ways beyond just reducing logistical costs and minimizing delays. It offers the flexibility to switch from CapEx to OpEx model of operations and ensures efficient management of warehousing without additional operational bandwidth. It can be implemented within 7 days, and a pay-per-use model, resulting in immediately reduced lead time, inventory holding, logistics, and overall costs, leading to increased customer satisfaction, sales, and profitability margins.

As competition intensifies in the e-commerce space, brands are expected to be more responsive and proactive towards their markets. With the help of demand-based inventory distribution, you can future-proof your e-commerce business against fluctuating demand, stay competitive, and grow steadily. 

Categories
Regional Utilization

Increff Launches Regional Utilization Module

The shopping season is ON, are you closer to your customer?

As fashion brands & retailers prepare their stock for one of the most awaited e-commerce season sales, Amazon’s Great Indian Festival and Flipkart’s Big Billion Day, Increff launches Regional Utilization (RU) module to reduce additional logistic costs and deliver a smooth online order delivery journey.

In warehouses focused on e-commerce fulfillment, inventory placement is complex for brands that have a high number of SKUs with low depth. It requires constant demand analysis and in-depth logistics planning to achieve a desirable return on investments.

Regional utilization, specifically designed for e-commerce, translates deep insights into concrete action points to determine the demand-wise distribution of stock across the country, bringing brands closer to customers.   

How can Regional Utilization help?

  1. Smart inventory allocation across multiple warehouses achieves higher regional utilization by order fulfillment from the local warehouse
  2. Saving Rs. 20-22 additional costs per Piece on logistics
  3. Faster deliveries result in better visibility and higher conversion on marketplaces
  4. Significantly lower rate of returns due to the faster delivery

One of India’s top ethnic wear brands recognized the need for controlling expenses and enhancing customer experience. They were experiencing lofty shipment costs and higher delivery timelines. By integrating Regional utilization, they saved ~12% on logistics, thus increasing overall margins and enhancing regional fulfillment by ~30%. Download the infographic here.

To experience an immediate impact on your bottom line, talk to our experts today to understand how Regional Utilization can help your brand allocate inventory smartly and save BIG this festive season!

Check it for yourself, sign up or FREE at https://iris.increff.com