Cheap, fast, convenient

With customer loyalty the lifeblood of any brand or business, ensuring continued patronage is a constantly evolving industry challenge among retail companies, especially with ecommerce now existing comfortably with brick-and-mortar shops.

A global SaaS firm advises these brands, therefore, to focus on three key factors that influence today’s shoppers: cheap, fast and convenient.

“Nowadays, there’s no more ‘brand loyalty’ among customers. The customers also do not see channels; it’s only the retailers and brands that are mindful of channels at this stage, says Dennis de Jesus, country manager of Anchanto Philippines. “Customers will get [products] from the outlet or shop that will offer them at the most convenient, cheapest, fastest [possible way], whether online or offline.”

For any brand, enhancing the customer experience starts with one very important factor: inventory unification.

A unified inventory, explains De Jesus, empowers customers to make that decision on how they will secure their purchase. Whether a customer wants it delivered straight to their doorstep, or to pick it up at a branch that’s closest to them, the process will be smooth and seamless if a brand is able to have a unified record of its merchandise across channels and stores.

Unification can also come in the form of a brand’s loyalty program, De Jesus adds. “Some stores still handpick which [of their branches or channels] allow customers to earn points. If you are able to unify that loyalty experience, then that’s a differentiator.”

From building a robust and cohesive inventory system, brands can then focus on their fulfillment process–particularly, tools that enable order aggregation and orchestration. These, says De Jesus, are especially useful for brands running their multiple online stores, and need to cater to customers across the country.

Given that it’s hard to compete with marketplaces’ shorter delivery timeframes, Anchanto offers a cloud-based order aggregation and orchestration solution that automatically fetches orders from brands’ online marketplace stores and websites every three minutes, then routes them to the most convenient warehouse based on their tagged location.

Through this kind of solution, brands can confidently offer their customers a shorter delivery time.

‘Dark stores’

The use of dark stores is another component to order fulfillment success, De Jesus adds. Instead of establishing large distribution centers or warehouses, brands can set up these dark stores where more streamlined processes can be implemented.

“In these dark stores, you can just, for example, pick, pack and then ship,” De Jesus says. “But, again, the challenge is how can you identify the right quantities needed for these smaller warehouses? It’s still through unification of information.

Finally, De Jesus recommends that retail and ecommerce brands explore the power of online influencers to increase their customer base.

He cites Tiktok Shop as an industry game-changer, as it has allowed sellers to leverage users with large groups of followers through its affiliate program. —contributed INQ