How can retailers keep track of stock when moving online? Integrate their e-commerce operations with in-store point of sale systems. Melinda Oliver gets the details.
When online retailing was in its infancy, it was often viewed by retail chains and independent boutiques as an ‘add-on’ or experimental part of business. Now, numerous brands such as Bardot, Witchery and Pumpkin Patch report that their e-tail arms generate sales equivalent to a stand-alone store. Niche Fashion Technology director Hilary Haeusler has witnessed the rapid evolution.
“Eight or nine years ago fashion retailers got into web stores and everyone was saying, ‘I’ve got to get a web store’, and they all went off and put catalogues online,” she says. “They got their first range up and they might have got their second range up and then thought, this is too hard.”
According to Haeusler, most retailers are now in the second phase, where the larger players have a dedicated staff member or team for online. A key hurdle is that many retailers still treat e-commerce as a separate entity to their bricks-and-mortar operations.
The technology for their website and in-store point of sales (POS) systems do not connect. Haeusler says this causes problems with inventory control, as stock count does not automatically update across both platforms when a sale is made. This needs to be changed manually each day.
Co-owner of The Ark womenswear brand Christine Metcalfe experienced this issue in the early stages of launching the brand’s e-tail site. The Melbourne-based three-store company went live on April 2009 to sell its trans-seasonal offer of basics, knits and trousers to its core demographic of 35-plus female consumers.
“We originally had a completely manual system,” she says. “It was very staff intensive. You had to be very diligent about checking the stock to make sure that it was still available or not.”
Metcalfe says this slow updating process sometimes resulted in the need to refund money to customers when a product ordered was not available.
To rectify the issue, The Ark recently worked with Haeusler to upgrade what she describes as the third phase of online retailing – integrating online and POS operations.
All sales are now automatically registered across each platform. Haeusler says this allows for advanced inventory control, where stock can be pulled from various areas such as the warehouse or incoming stock. This integration also serves as a base to facilitate the growing field of multichannel retailing.
“I think the future is multi-channeling,” she says. “It is giving people lots of different options on the way they want to purchase.
“You can go online and order it [a product], you can then pick it up in a shop, we [the retailer] can send it to you, you can pick it up from the warehouse. Once you have bought it you can take it back to a different store, or you can send it to back to us [the retailer].”
Melbourne-based Apparel 21 director Luke Haites is also in the race to provide the best technology solutions for retailers. In addition to giving customers flexibility on where and how they buy and return goods, he says integrated technology systems allow for VIP customer lists, promotions and loyalty discount information to be readily available across all platforms.
“For the business [it offers] a higher level of customer service,” he says. “They know what each customer has bought and that gives much better marketing information.
“They can do accurately targeted marketing campaigns and have better decision making based on what channels are best for different products.”
Multichannel retailing extends to the use of mobile phones, with an increasing number of e-tail sites becoming phone-friendly.
Further to this, Sydney-based company Futura Retail Solution is releasing a phone application to enhance operations for store owners and area managers. Technical director Mike McLoughlin says the system, Futura4Phone, feeds live sales information to an authorised user’s Blackberry or iPhone.
“Usually store managers have to ring around to check figures at lunch time or the end of the day, but that doesn’t have to be done anymore,” he says.
He says it enables area managers on the road to keep abreast of peaks and lows in sales performance across a broad network of stores and actively respond to changes.