Omnichannel Retailing: The Future Trend of Fashion
Pakistan’s E-commerce is slated to become the channel of choice. Year over year, Online sales have shown continuous growth & traditional brick & mortar brands are doubling down on their E-commerce strategies. The numbers are telling: Pakistan’s E-commerce industry is on course to break the $1B barrier in 2020 & will continue to do so even after it.
Nowadays, technological advancements, demanding customers, and changing shopping behavior has created a major competition among retailers & they are finally recognizing the need to adapt and respond to these challenges to survive in the industry.
There’s a growing need to strategically respond & adapt to digital forces by creating a better retail experience for customers, modern retail supply chains, &, most importantly, use of Omnichannel retail strategies. Omnichannel allows retailers to unify their multiple online and offline store locations into a single hub. It connects your inventory to all your marketplaces, social media and point of sale solutions. You can manage sales across all channels with automatic syncing, allowing you to optimize inventory, avoid errors like advertising out of stock product ads etc.
Shopistan has come up with a remarkable technology that it calls ‘Omnichannel Engine’ which would most certainly change the horizon of Pakistan’s retail industry. It acts as a cloud server that allows retailers to manage their product inventories from a centralized location. If a retailer has several stores, the inventory will be exported from each of these stores’ ERP and deposited in a central feed & would be accessible to all the channels, offline and online.
Omnichannel Engine’s integration with multiple POS systems like Microsoft Dynamics, Candela, Shopdesk & Retailpro enables it to easily sync inventory with websites. Once the customer orders the desired product, OE immediately updates inventory levels real-time on all platforms including all POS systems and also on online stores, ensuring you don’t oversell a product. This real-time data also lets you personalize your customers’ experience online and/or in-store.
Inventory management is arguably the most important asset to your business. If there’s no inventory going out, there’s no revenue coming in. Traditional inventory management methods like dedicating inventory to multiple warehouses — can’t keep pace with modern industry landscape. Omnichannel Engine by Shopistan’s breakthrough technology helps you have a system which unifies all your inventory touch points creating a seamless inventory maximization process. It also helps you create a faster order management process and provides a single view of inventory across channels by making sure that you can easily track inventory from the manufacturer, to the warehouse, to the point of sale. This makes it easy for a retailer to keep a centralized record of items and provides a single source of truth for each product location and number in stock. Returns are seamlessly tracked as well, and errors are minimized. Furthermore, it provides you with multi courier options. Let’s say you want to have different courier partners for different parts of your country, you can easily do that with just a click. It not only makes your customer service operations more smooth but is also a very cost effective.
For online retailers, Business intelligence (BI) has been critical to personalizing the experience and making the process as efficient as possible. OE has the ability to gather, store and use data to create custom reports regarding customer activity on your online store. It also provides you with real-time sales figure of your brand & you can also get useful insights to make informed decisions to help your business grow in the right direction.
For every order, there are many steps that need to be completed. But off course customers are not interested in that. All they care for is to get their order as fast as it can get. The necessity is to automate the completion of as many of those steps as possible & OE lets you do just that. The aim is to reduce and ultimately eliminate any manual effort in your order management process that can cause delays and increases costs and the likelihood of potentially costly errors. Let’s say you received an order from Karachi, you can easily assign to its respective POS with the help of Geo-location and generate packing slips. You can also automate order bookings with multi couriers. This change will not only increase the efficiency of your operations, but will also free up valuable resources to focus on productive activity — like improving sales, improving delivery times and increasing ROI.
