[00:00:00] Hi everybody. Welcome to this episode of Commerce Today. I'm actually taking your questions about Omnichannel Retail. So I'm going to dive right in. First of all, I have quite a bit of experience in Omnichannel Retail. In this case I am referring to basically stores that are also selling online.

Most of my experience is with companies that have between 50 and 150 stores, although had one project that was three stores. And I don't think we've broken the 150 store mark on the high end yet, but I'm sure we will soon. Basically helping them integrate their operations between their website and their stores.

Obviously this means things like curbside pickup or buy online pickup and store, but it's also more esoteric things you might not have heard of before, such as vendorship to store and lots of other fun stuff like that. So diving right in. What initially drew you to working on omni channel fulfillment for retailers?

I have always been interested in e commerce. I did my first e commerce project in 1999. Very different days back then, but [00:01:00] had someone I was working for in a totally different capacity that was interested in launching an e commerce business and I said, Hey, I'll dive right in and learn how to do that.

So through the years I have worked in basically every aspect of e commerce both on the B2B side and the B2C side. And literally. I've written code, I've designed solutions, I've helped pack and ship orders, I've optimized warehouses. And I really feel like omni channel solutions are just so interesting.

Nothing against the PurePlay D2C brands that have a website, and that's, a website in Amazon, and that's pretty much how they sell. But when you start throwing stores into the mix, there's just so much interesting buyer psychology, and all sorts of other things that we get to work with just at a Totally different level than whenever you're only dealing with an online experience So that's what drew me in and then we had quite a bit of success at creativity my agency with a company called Rulking oh goodness about 10 years ago now And we won a lot of industry awards [00:02:00] for that.

We won a best omni channel fulfillment solution award at 2017 Magento imagine so just got a lot of accolades and recognition that led to a lot more projects in that specific niche. So still doing that sort of work. And I'm actually going to talk about the Royal King project in our next episode of Commerce Today.

If you're interested in omni channel retail, if you like what we talk about today, definitely stay tuned for next week's episode. So first question really about omni channel is. What has changed the most in omni channel retail in the past five to ten years? And I think the easy answer there is the pandemic.

Pre pandemic there weren't a lot of curbside pickups. It was buy online pickup in store, not, in front of store. So that obviously changed a lot. And it seems like a small change but it's really not. because as we'll talk about in this episode and next week's episode sometimes the store staffing side of things is actually a bigger challenge than the technical integrations when you're deploying something like curbside [00:03:00] pickup.

So when you're doing curbside pickup, now all of a sudden, instead of going to a pickup counter and helping someone pick up an order there or using a locker or something like that. Now you have to have a store employee that's actually going to transport the customer's order outside of the store into their car at the curbside.

I feel like there's a lot of companies that rolled that out during the pandemic because they had to, and now we're actually walking it back and are asking customers to come back. in the store. Just because staffing numbers beyond that though I think in the past five to 10 years, something exciting that changed, at least for me, cause I'm a omni channel retail nerd the integration speed.

So integrations are simpler and there's more and more real time or near real time integrations. We were really pushing the envelope 10 years ago with an integration that. across about 110 stores was updating 100, 000 inventory SKU price combinations every 15 minutes. So you can do the math there.

That's millions of updates every 15 minutes. And that was pretty cool. That was cutting edge. That [00:04:00] was, people were like, that's not possible. And we were able to make it happen. Now there's just so much. advanced with the technology to where using messaging queues and other systems you can get real time or near real time updates.

And obviously, especially during high volume seasons like the holiday season or springtime for a lot of farm at home retailers That matters because your inventory is moving so fast you don't want someone to place an order for store pickup thinking they're going to get it in two hours but that item's actually already sold out in that store.

So can you walk us through a real world example of a retailer you worked with to implement BOPIS? I'm going to dive in depth on that one in our next episode. Both Rural King and Family Farm and Home, two fairly similar store chains that we have worked with on the BOPIS side of things. I will say that Both of those, while very similar, companies took different approaches to the implementation, and I think it's going to be a great episode and a great example of why some of the business decisions you can make [00:05:00] can have a huge impact, possibly a bigger impact than what e commerce platform you select.

But that's just going to be a teaser for next week's episode, so stay tuned for that one. What are the biggest technical and operational challenges in making BOPIS work seamlessly? Operational is definitely the employee side, it's the training. Training, staffing stores have to be bought in on it.

One of the retailers I worked with, I won't name names in this case, cause I don't want to shame the guilty in this case. But, one of the retailers, they had quite a few stores, and we learned very quickly which stores really cared about their e commerce customers and which ones didn't. Didn't.

And so we would see where orders would be hitting this exception queue because they were out of stock or there's some other issue and some of the stores were great about just jumping on that, taking care of it, figuring out what happened and making it right for the customer. And there were other stores that someone actually from the e commerce operations team would have to call the store and say, Hey guys, y'all need to go take care of this.

You need to take care of this. And sometimes it was training. They just, the person that was there that day hadn't been [00:06:00] trained yet. So training is always a big part of it. Okay. But sometimes it was a store manager that quite frankly had told the employees, online orders are your lowest priority. And that was a really short sighted move by that store manager because we could see the numbers and we could see what store sales were doing whenever people were getting a good omni channel experience.

And it was simple. It drove substantially more traffic and more store visits and more revenue. Those people that had good buy online, pick up in the store experiences, not only would go back to that store, but they would actually. add on additional things, buy additional things while they were there in the store.

On the technical side probably the biggest challenge with BOPIS and with any omni channel fulfillment is suddenly you're integrating with cache registers, you're integrating with systems that lots of times you don't have to touch. pure play e commerce set up so that's probably the biggest technical challenge is just dealing with all the different systems because it definitely adds a few more systems to the mix.

What are some of the best practices you've seen for ensuring a smooth BOPIS experience for both customers and [00:07:00] store staff? I'm going to talk some about a custom order management system that we built in next week's episode and seamless for store staff. If you're using an off the shelf order management system and you don't have a lot of flexibility or customization and you can't customize it to your particular store's workflow, you're going to have a bad time.

You're basically telling these overworked store employees that lots of times while they're trying to pick an order or while they're trying to complete an order. They're also having customers ask them questions. They're having a lot of different things happening. It's not a static, sitting behind a cubicle kind of environment.

So if you're asking them to learn a whole new system, whole different system from what they're already using is they're going to have a bad time. So we have found that through building a headless react base, very lightweight order management system. We're able to make it look just like the existing store systems.

The stores were already using that lowered the training burden that lowered the frustration from those employees just provided a better [00:08:00] experience all around on the customer side. It's actually really simple signage signage. And if you can keep it consistent between your stores I've just seen too many cases where you walk into a store.

And you don't know, do I go to a cash register? Do I go to the customer service desk? Is there a separate BOPIS pickup point? If it's at the customer service desk is it the same line as everyone else? Is there a separate line? Just invest in signage. And I know it's an investment, when you're talking about a hundred different stores having to buy new signage.

But I think it will have such a big impact. on your omni channel rollout. How can retailers decide whether BOPIS is right for them and what kind of technology investments are required? If you have stores and you have customers, BOPIS is probably right for you. We're getting to the point where BOPIS is table stakes.

It's what people expect. If you're a super tiny mall kiosk set up. then maybe you can get away with not offering BOPIS, but anything bigger than that, customers just expect it. And then as far as the technology investment that's getting lower and [00:09:00] lower. So we actually worked with a company using Stripe or Square, a company using Square and the Square POS system.

This was actually that omni channel retailer I mentioned that only had three stores. So very small, very lightweight on the technology side. And we were able to build out a BOPIS experience on that platform. So the technology investment really depends on how many systems you're integrating how many stores you have, how much data you're pushing around.

This retailer I'm referring to is actually a chocolate store and they had maybe 50 SKUs. So 50 SKUs, three stores using Square, super lightweight and simple. Not a huge investment required. Obviously the. 150 store retailer, a little bit bigger investment, especially since they were, they had a warehouse management system.

They had that POS system that I mentioned. It was actually an Epicor based POS. So it was it was intense. As anyone who's worked with Epicor will know. So the investment definitely varies. I would be more than happy to give you a ballpark idea of what that could look [00:10:00] like. On my LinkedIn profile, so look for me on LinkedIn, it's Joshua Warren off of Creatuity Gold background behind my head.

Send me a message or there's actually a book an appointment link there. You can do a free 30 minute e commerce problem solving session. And I can help you get a sense of what that technology investment might look like. All right, ship from store is next. So here's a few good ship from store questions I've gotten.

So what's the business case for turning physical stores into mini fulfillment centers? This one is where so many ship from store efforts get bogged down, is building out the business case and especially getting the stores on board for it. And it is a business case. A lot of people think, oh, how hard could it be?

They give them a label printer, give them a computer. It's not that big of a difference from buy online, pick up and store. And in some ways it's not. But one thing that was eye opening for me, the very first Omnichannel project I worked on that involved more than 100 stores, was the cardboard bill.

They were selling, it was one of the farm and home retailers, and they were selling a number of different sized items from very small to very large. [00:11:00] And of course the largest we didn't offer for ship. from store. Kayaks were actually the, one of the items that people wanted the most that we had to say, no, we're not going to try to ship kayaks.

Apparently they had tried that didn't work out too well. A lot of damage claims as you can imagine. They had to order a ton of different size boxes. They had to find space in the store for those boxes. They had to pay for those boxes all just to get. ship from store up and running. So definitely have to build out that business case.

Typically the simplest way to do it is based on looking at your customer demographics doing some research, those questions that you can ask at the checkout, like what zip code do you live in, or did you come from today different things like that. But typically what I've found is retailers are underestimating the.

I guess laziness of the American consumer. They're underestimating the revenue lift they'll get when people don't have to leave the house to get a product that was previously only available in store. And this can be huge, especially if you're selling, I've found that [00:12:00] pet food and different types of feed that are relatively constricted by the manufacturer.

If the manufacturer doesn't allow them, doesn't allow like Amazon to sell them and you have to go to a retailer if your agreement allows you to ship those from store to your customers you're going to have a huge revenue lift off of that because people don't want to go into the stores. They may have been going to one of your competitors that were slightly closer to them before.

But if they're loyal to your brand or you have a better price, now they're going to order it from you since you can ship it to them. It's definitely a process and something you have to do case by case, retailer by retailer. But there's typically a pretty solid business case for ship from store.

What are some of the major challenges you have seen retailers face when adopting ship from store cardboard? Like I mentioned so just having to buy all those different sizes of boxes. Also just the training again. So now not only are people in the store having to pick orders, they're having to ship orders as well.

Depending on the size of your business, the size of the store we've actually seen stores grow their ship. from [00:13:00] store efforts to the level where they had a full time employee dedicated just to ship from store. And it was still a highly profitable endeavor. So I think you can start small and start with using existing store employees, but as it scales, definitely keep an eye on it and be willing to invest in that staffing.

How does ship from store impact store operations, staffing, and inventory management? Hey, just answered half of that, but definitely on the store operations side. It takes the management and store management efforts to a new level because the store manager now has to make sure that employees understand, customers come first, but what does that mean?

So if customers standing in front of you asking a question, probably need to answer that. But then what if you have someone that's coming to pick up an online order? And it hasn't been pulled yet, and the expectation was that it would be pulled within two hours, and it's been three hours. And then what if FedEx drivers come in and you haven't finished all the ship from store shipments for that day?

Suddenly there's different priorities, and especially having a manager that's willing to step in and [00:14:00] fill the gap whenever one of those priorities is behind or struggling can make or break a ship from store rollout. And this is why it's so important, especially when I talk to e commerce teams, they get so excited.

It was like, Oh, ship from store, we're going to get credit for that revenue. It's going to be additional revenue. It's going to make us look even better. They get really excited about it and I have to say, hold on. Let's make sure you have a good relationship with your store operations teams.

Let's make sure whoever owns the retail and brick and mortar side of the business is on your side and you have a good relationship with them. Because this is going to change a lot in their world and they may not quite be ready for it. They may not understand it or they just may view it as you're trying to grab, basically take some credit from them without putting in the same level of work.

So definitely have some relational items more than technical items there. All so I'm going to skip to a few questions on ship to store and vendor ship to store. We'll cover that in more depth in next week's episode, but. How do retailers use ship to store differently from BOPIS or ship from store?

So [00:15:00] ship to store, where I've typically seen that used is special orders, special order products. So products that you can't pick it up same day in the store, but you can pick it up, say, three days later. I know both Best Buy as well as Home Depot and Lowe's are all really good at this as far as they'll say, Hey.

You can get it in your local store, you can have that pickup experience, but you can't have it for 3 days, 5 days, however long it takes. And the difference here typically depends on how many warehouses you have, and how well stocked those warehouses are, and how often your trucks are going from your warehouses out to your stores.

If you don't have a warehouse, then you're probably not going to do a lot of ship to store. It's all going to be vendor ship to store. It's basically where the vendors are either drop shipping straight to your store, or they are placing it on trucks that are already going to replenish your store stock.

What retailers have done a great job using vendor ship to store and what are the key benefits? The vendors that have done best with vendor ship to store had really good relationships with Those vendors and with those [00:16:00] suppliers, because I have seen some of these vendorship to store systems we've deployed where there are hundreds of orders that are overdue by weeks because there are vendors that honestly just don't get it or don't care.

And then I've seen some where things are just buzzing along and customers are so happy because you're meeting or exceeding their expectations. And so having those good vendor relationships and so many of these omni channel efforts, getting out in front of it all by. Setting expectations, having really good conversations, indicating what you expect, maybe even building some penalties in, or at least letting them know that if they aren't able to keep up with demand, you're gonna turn this off and not be ordering as much from them.

Just different things like that to shore up basically make sure they're on board before you launch Vendor Ship to Store. Wrapping up, future of Omnichannel, do a couple of these So looking to 2026 and beyond, what's the biggest trend shaping omni channel fulfillment? I have to [00:17:00] mention AI.

I've gone like 20 minutes without mentioning AI. It's killing me here. Actually at Meet Magento Florida a few weeks ago the CEO of Chewy was there, the pet supply company. And he was talking about how they are in a race to be the first major omni channel retailer. Or I guess retailer to offer, to build out.

a digital twin of their entire fulfillment process. So digital twin basically means having a digital version, digital simulation of every warehouse, every item, every vendor, every truck, everything that can even run in real time like as a mirror of what's happening in the real world. You see they're building that out so that then they can take AI.

Have an AI use that digital twin and just run every possible scenario and figure out what is the optimum fulfillment solution. Like for each and every package, each and every inventory movement, how can we do this fastest and cheapest? And once that's done, then have that [00:18:00] AI move from that digital twin to actually running.

the real world operations for Chewy's fulfillment. So really cool. It takes a lot of computers, a lot of data, a huge investment. I think five years from now, that'll be software that somebody like Shipper HQ will just have built into their solution. But right now it is not quite here yet. And retailers like Chewy are making those huge investments to try to pave the way and bring it to reality.

And that's about it for today, time wise. Thank you, as always, for joining me for Commerce Today. Just a reminder, based on when and where you're listening to this, I live stream these episodes, video and audio, on LinkedIn, YouTube, Facebook maybe Instagram, but I think it's just clips on Instagram.

X, and then the audio is also put out as a podcast into every major podcast player out there under commerce today. So however you're watching, however you're listening, thank you for joining me. If you would be interested in being a guest on commerce today, I would love to have you on [00:19:00] the show.

Easiest way to set that up is to send me a DM on LinkedIn and I will see y'all next week for another fun conversation around omni channel retail. Thanks.