Recent Articles
eCommerce: How to Keep Customers Happy by Making Returns a Breeze This Holiday Season
Why not make this coming return season (Dec 26 through Jan 15…and beyond) your golden opportunity to build customer loyalty? During the holiday surge, a flood of orders originates from all different channels: including online shopping carts, postal mail order forms, inbound calls to customer service centers and physical points of purchase at brick and mortar store locations. As we’ve discussed in this blog series, an integrated order processing, inventory management, and shipping system puts you in a perfect position to profit by following back office system best practices. But let’s not forget that, after the holidays, some of those flawlessly stocked and shipped items are coming back. In fact, according to an NRF report, 75% of last year’s (2016) holiday shoppers checked a merchant’s return policies before making a purchase. Happily, over 80% described the return process as somewhat or very easy. Bottom line? This sets the bar very high for your own returns handling processes. Here are 5 ways you can streamline your return policy to make it seamless and easy, for customers and for you. #1 Define effective
Save Time & Money – Prepare for Seasonal Warehouse Order Surges
As a busy eCommerce retailer, you’re probably acutely aware of the “Monday Rush.” Those orders that have been accumulating since they were completed and paid for on your eCommerce platform Friday afternoon, all day Saturday, all day Sunday AND early Monday morning. Now it’s “Monday Rush” AM and your warehouse staff is faced with their biggest pick, pack and ship day of the week. What’s even worse is the 3-day weekend “Tuesday Rush." Add in the upcoming “Black Friday,” “Cyber Monday” and the rest of the upcoming holiday seasonal rush, and it's easy to see how bogged down warehouse systems can get! Well, thank heavens for your experienced warehouse workers. They know what they’re doing, they're very familiar with your product and they know the layout of your warehouse. They’ve been through a lot of Monday or Tuesday Rushes, and you have a high level of confidence that the backlog of orders will get out the door with little or no errors. Besides, you probably pay them more for this extra knowledge and experience, right? But the fact is: even
How to Protect Yourself from Phishing Emails
GUEST POST BY COMPASS IT COMPLIANCE'S GEOFF YEAGLEY With the holiday season rapidly approaching, the expectation is that the number of phishing emails will continue to rise. Phishing remains the number one method that cybercriminals use to distribute Malware, gain access to sensitive information, and steal information that they can then sell to make money. In fact, a recent statistic suggests that 91% of all data breaches started with a phishing email. For that reason, I take examples of phishing emails that I receive, or my coworkers receive, post them to the blog, and point out the things of which you need to be careful. I do this to educate folks about what the latest threats look like, what differentiates a good phishing email from a bad phishing email, and how to protect yourself from an attack. Below is an example of a phishing email I received back in June suggesting that I needed to attend a court hearing for evading taxes. Before we dig into the nuts and bolts of this email, one thing that I want to point
Holiday Deadlines Fast Approaching
Halloween has come and gone leaving us even less time than normal to regret all the candy we “checked” for our kids (chocolate and peanut butter is the best!) with the advent of the annual USPS announcement about Holiday mail deadlines. Thanks to the good folks at EcommerceBytes here is a comprehensive guide to ensuring that your customers will receive their packages on time. Plan ahead because USPS expects to deliver 15 Billion pieces of mail and 850 million packages between Thanksgiving and New Years Day. Now if they could perform a public service and automatically scan for and get rid of all those ugly sweaters we all hate.
How to Master Inventory Management During the Holiday Season
If poorly planned and handled, multichannel inventory management can get very ugly during high-volume order surges around holidays. Without question, the Number One holiday inventory mandate is: avoid stock outs. All of your resources and expertise must be focused on having the right items in the right mix at the right place to meet holiday demand. Poor omnichannel inventory management can create stock outs for one channel while other channels suffer overstocks. Inventory must be managed holistically across channels, from ecommerce shopping carts to call centers, from catalog orders to point of sale at brick and mortar stores. Forecast, Deploy, and Flex Forecast, Deploy, and Flex may sound like the name of a law firm, but in fact they are the three keys to winning the battle against inventory mismatches. First, generate an inventory plan that comes as close to actual demand as possible (understanding that, by definition, all forecasts are wrong, of course). Second, position the specific amount of inventory at warehouses, racks, bins, stores, and third party drop shippers for on-time fulfillment…and customer satisfaction. Finally, develop the flexibility
Don’t Let Shipping Fulfillment Workflow Mishaps Ruin the Holidays
Imagine shipping 6,000 orders in a single day. OK, we just said that to scare you, but one of our customers actually did just that...and lived to tell the tale. And as you might imagine, they're quite proud of it. Whatever your normal shipping volume is, here’s one thing you know for sure: it’s going way up during the holidays. Another thing we all know? Convoluted workflow is the greatest threat to meeting our commitments to customers and clients on time and at optimal cost during all-important peak business periods. Convoluted workflows do not scale, but your retail shipping workload is going to grow…and grow. According to Deloitte, "Sentiment and spending indicators are firing on all cylinders.” Deloitte’s annual forecast calls for holiday retail sales to rise a healthy 4-to-4.5 percent in 2017. Seasonally adjusted total holiday sales will hit $1.04 trillion between November and January. eCommerce sales are predicted to increase by 18 to 21 percent, reaching over $110 billion during the 2017 holiday season. Oh my, that’s a lot to ship. Every merchant, from brick-and-mortar retailers to mail