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Black Friday and Cyber Monday Show Importance of Omnichannel Efforts

retail shoppers on mobile devices

Black Friday Sales Up in 2018

This year, Cyber Monday became the highest U.S. ecommerce sales day in history with nearly eight billion dollars in revenue. The National Retail Federation announced that 54 percent of consumers participated in omnichannel approach – buying both online and in brick and mortar stores. Amazon announced that Cyber Monday was the biggest sales day in company history.

Online shopping through mobile devices represented 54 percent of site visits in 2018, up nearly 19 percent from 2017. This accounted for roughly 35 percent of revenue which was an 18 percent increase year-over-year.

Despite the increase in revenue on Black Friday, in-store foot traffic actually fell by 1.7 percent compared to last year. With an increasing emphasis on mobile browsing and shopping, companies must make sure they are providing an excellent omnichannel experience for their consumers.

If an organization cannot deliver on them, the customer can very easily find another avenue where their expectations can be met, whether that is with a brick and mortar competitor or one of the multitude of online retailers or e-commerce giants. Fortunately, the path to fulfilling those customer expectations is achievable through retail operations excellence.

Amazon and other e-commerce giants are the primary source of concern for retailers today. Moving beyond the omni-channel world and into a “unified commerce” approach to business is the key to success in the age of Amazon. Unified commerce is the strategy of putting the customer experience first, without respect to the “channel” they are operating in. This is accomplished by having a single view of the customer, order, inventory, item and payment across all locations and channels. Retailers are striving for personalization with their customers in order to give them convenient customer service and a seamless personalized experience.

Delivering on customer’s expectations is both the most challenging and most important part of a retailer’s job. It is estimated that it costs seven to ten times more to acquire a new customer than to keep an existing one. Brand loyalty is the key aspect of retaining customers. Brand loyalty is increased by continuously delivering an excellent customer service experience from the beginning of the order life cycle to the end.

12 Dirty Little Secrets Retailers and Manufacturers Need to Know About Inventory Optimization

OMS Is The Key

Retailers want to keep the promises they make and an Order Management System (OMS) is perhaps the cornerstone of technology in accomplishing that. The order lifecycle encompasses every aspect of unified commerce from the moment a customer places an order to how it is picked, shipped, paid for and delivered. A fully integrated OMS has an impact at each stage of the order life cycle and plays a role in managing and executing on the customer promise, experience and ultimate satisfaction. unified commerce success.

There are eight components of the order life cycle which the OMS governs: item, inventory, customer, order, payment, fulfillment, shipment/carrier and integration.

Utilizing these features of an OMS at each stage of the order management life cycle provides organizations benefits in several key areas:

  • Enterprise Inventory Visibility – A fully integrated OMS makes sure that a company is always aware of the location of all of its inventory, regardless of where it sits, whether that is at a physical location, with a third-party logistics provider (3PL), near customers, in a virtual or physical vendor or in a manufacturing location.
  • Order Routing – An OMS gives retailers the ability to allocate and reserve inventory based on attributes and algorithms.
  • Fulfillment Execution – OMS allows stores to generate more revenue by determining the most efficient ways to fulfill orders (in-store fulfillment, Buy online pick-up in store (BOPIS), ship from store, or drop ship from a vendor).
  • Customer Service and Experience – OMS streamlines the process of receiving an order, managing customer appeasement, managing payment transactions and case management when something goes wrong.

The next revolution of order management is the integration of PIM, OMS, POS, and e-commerce into a common data model with a common user interface with an integration first approach. Unified commerce is about technology, and beyond that, it is about integration. Value is driven by increasing inventory visibility because it gives retailers, regardless of channel, the ability to manage capital. Above all else, retailers need to keep the promises they make to their customers, and OMS is a key way to do that. OMS is the primary factor in truly unifying commerce channels.

Read more about how you can help provide value to your customers through an order management system.

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