Attire Accessories - Dec 2017/Jan 2018 (Issue 67)

ATTIRE 99 E-COMMERCE Derek O’Carroll is CEO of Brightpearl, responsible for the overall company strategy and for delivering on its mission to automate retail. During the ’90s, O’Carroll founded two IT companies. In 1994, he founded Adnet, Ireland’s first online advertising agency building database driven websites and offering SEO services. In 1999, he founded Vordel, which became a leading provider of XML security solutions and was sold to Axway in 2012. O’Carroll joined Brightpearl from Symantec where he held leadership positions across their Enterprise, Small Business and Consumer divisions for the past 10 years. Most recently, he served as Senior Vice President of field sales and marketing for Norton, responsible for $1.7billion of revenue globally. During his two-year tenure, he led a highly successful transformation of the go-to-market activities returning North America, EMEA and Asia Pacific to growth, enabling the global transition from traditional CD-based software delivery to a cloud-based security service. to different audiences with different price sensitivities. Therefore, your prices may need to be different from channel to channel. Amazon and eBay shoppers are especially price sensitive, so even 50 pence can make a difference – whereas in-store customers may be willing to pay slightly more. There are two ways to manage pricing. Some systems include built-in automated price management , which is particularly useful for channels with price-sensitive shoppers where you are likely to make changes more often. If your system doesn’t include automated repricing, you can take an outside price management approach and deactivate price management for that channel, delegating responsibility to a separate price- management system. 3 Get to real-time inventory updates Access to real-time data is key to helping retailers make the right decisions about fulfilment management which allows them to remain competitive. In today’s retail landscape managers need the ability to view the latest trends and demand changes so they can shift or adjust their tactics to meet changes in market conditions For example, if a customer orders shoes or a gift with free two-day delivery, which distribution centre or store should the product be shipped from? Several factors come into play: the ability to meet delivery windows, the cost-effectiveness of shipping options, and inventory impact versus demand, to name just a few. Having a solution in place that allows access to real-time inventory updates and fulfilment data is key to strategic decision making. For example, a retailer with access to that information can easily see which supply chain or shipping decision controls costs and, therefore, best aligns with the retailer’s long- term business goals. 4 Avoid the double-selling risk Double-selling becomes a greater risk when you trade on more than one sales channel. There are two ways to avoid selling a product on one channel while a sale is being processed on another channel. With pre-allocation , you reserve a percentage of your inventory from each channel as a pad against double-selling. While this ensures you don’t disappoint a customer, it removes unsold products from inventory, so you can’t sell them. You can also use quick synchronisation , which updates your inventory ASAP post sale. This keeps all inventory available, but leaves a small risk of double-selling, since no system can update all channels instantaneously. 5 Simplify e-commerce and accounting with a hub When you venture into new sales channels, your e-commerce and accounting software may need help managing the workload with a multichannel retail management system or hub to handle the complexities of fulfillment across channels. When you pull sales from your e-commerce system (and others) into the hub where back-office processes like order processing, inventory management and customer service can be handled efficiently, you leave your e-commerce system to do what it does best: sales. A hub also provides more purchasing, order processing, and inventory management power. It sends consistent, branded invoices and communications, even if using different trade names on each channel, and it supports multiple levels of permissions so your whole team can work in the same system. Omni-channel shopping is leading to richer, more personalised commerce experiences for consumers, however it’s also increasing expectations and establishing new challenges for retailers. Those that can get omni-channel retail right can fuel huge revenue and profit growth, but they must harness the data available to them to develop more effective, efficient, and, importantly, profitable fulfilment strategies. These best-practice steps, among others, help flag and address the differences between channels without stretching your internal team – so you can get it right from the start. A For more advice on omni-channel retail solutions and software, visit brightpearl.com