In the six months before March 2022, many retailers’ online businesses experienced up to five years’ worth of growth – with one large department store seeing 75% of its sales move online.

With this increase in online sales, retailers are now competing to offer faster fulfilment, as next day or even same day delivery popularity grows.

So, how can retailers optimise their operations to cut costs and meet increasingly complex fulfilment demands? Our experts have identified four key areas to focus on:

Retailers are realising that they need to reduce handling times. In a highly competitive environment, products on shelves, waiting to be picked aren't great for their margins. This move to a ‘just-in-time’ fulfilment model means warehouses are becoming hubs that products pass through, often without spending the night.

Technology is the enabler here. When timing is everything, deploying automated devices along the product journey can keep things moving in the right direction. By placing radio frequency identification (RFID) tags on individual items or cases, products can be tracked by handheld or fixed RFID readers. Also, to free up staff from manual barcode scanning, smart cameras with image recognition and RFID can automate receiving stock at the warehouse.

Staying on top of where products are at all times is critical to protecting margins, fulfilling orders, and keeping consumers satisfied. Poor inventory visibility leads to overstocking, wastage, and disappointed customers - with 49% of them admitting to leaving a store because an item was out of stock¹.

So, keeping accurate inventories are a growing priority, resulting in a boom in the use of automation to track items on the shop floor. To make omnichannel trading work, retailers need to precisely synchronise their online and physical stores.

With retailers using staff to fulfil online orders in-store, they need to be able to locate items efficiently. This can be a challenge, especially in clothing stores where customers often relocate items after trying them on. But sensors in the ceiling can now track RFID-tagged items to give a constant view of stock. Then, smart replenishment tasking prompts staff to restock shelves as soon as there's likely to be a gap, keeping availability as high as possible for the customer.

In a Zebra’s global shopper study, 58% of shoppers believe they have a better access to information than most in-store staff ¹. Could this be true of your retail environment? To satisfy high consumer expectations, retailers need to empower their staff with the information they need. Providing sales assistants with mobile devices gives them instant access to product information, up-to-date store inventory, and order availability while on the shop floor.

These devices can also boost in-store communication, and help link tasks to real-time contextual information. For example, if it rains, store assistants can be prompted to move umbrellas to the front of the store to increase sales.

For most brands, brick-and-mortar retail is now the key touchpoint for direct customer experience where people can go to see, touch and try products. But, because shoppers today are used to being in control, they often find the traditional checkout experience frustrating.

Instead, retailers can provide more handheld self-service devices, so customers can scan items themselves and access product information instantly. This reduces queues in-store and also frees up staff to focus on more value-driven tasks like customer support.

Some stores are even introducing smart carts, where products are scanned by image recognition as they’re put in the trolley, and charged automatically to customers’ digital wallets when they leave. We’re expecting to see more experimentation with self-service models, as retailers seek to make the in-store experience as seamless as their online service.

There’s a massive choice of platforms, services, and applications to help retailers improve their fulfilment strategies – but it’s very easy to end up with a disjointed and hard-to-manage experience if they aren’t all knitted together effectively.

Working with our partners, such as BT, we deliver solutions that bring together security, platforms, software, connectivity, and management services to support your business.

Here’s what this can mean for you:

• Simple, accurate, and low-cost annual stocktakes and cycle counts.
• In-store teams with devices and software to make stocktaking easy – and you’ll be able to monitor live progress remotely via dashboards and analytics.
• High customer satisfaction by optimising on-shelf availability – we can use robotics and artificial intelligence (AI) to monitor your shelves and create tasks for staff to replenish stock, update shelf labels, or adjust layout.
• Support to make your omnichannel fulfilment seamless – our solution provides a real-time view of the RFID-tagged items in your store so your staff can always track items easily.
• Helping you track and manage assets throughout your supply chain with real-time location data that we translate into the visibility you need.

As a part of BT’s partner ecosystem, we take pride in delivering innovative solutions that make better business simple.

1. Zebra, 14th Annual Zebra Global Shopper Study, 2021