Allocation, Logistics And Omnichannel Fulfillment

By David Sisco, UPS

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Consumers’ e-commerce purchase delivery expectations are quickly changing, putting pressure on retailers to minimize fulfillment cost and complexity while maximizing fulfillment speed. The 2013 UPS Pulse of the Online Shopper: A Customer Experience Study underscores the reality: while “free shipping” and “variety of payment options” are most important to shoppers at checkout, more than half of the 14,000 global consumers surveyed for the comScore commissioned report said “provision of an estimated or guaranteed delivery date” and “confirmation of shipping costs early in the checkout process” are important, too.

Consumer demand for low-cost/no-cost fulfillment and on-time performance is only getting greater. While meeting that demand is forcing significant and sometimes painful change on retailers as they re-architect the fundamentals of fulfillment, the change is bearing fruit for early adopters. They’ve proven that achieving fulfillment performance within profit parameters is a matter of finesse, not force. Of the many manifestations of cross-channel fulfillment, click-and-collect and ship-from-store are two particularly promising approaches.

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