If you're in charge of store operations, you may not know what to think about ecommerce integration, or how to present it to your commissioned sales team.
You may ask yourself, ‘Won't my sales staff lose customers to the web?’
This is a common concern, and one that sales managers should address with their teams prior to implementing a multi channel e-commerce strategy. The reality is that for many retail categories, especially big-ticket, the greatest benefits of going online happen in stores. This may sound counterintuitive, but because big-ticket retail is fundamentally local and stores play a critical role. E-commerce stores become a powerful tool to help stores compete in their local markets rather than a national channel that bypasses them.
Online efforts serve to drive store traffic, generate leads and consummate online transactions — cost effectively and measurably. Many retailers have found that this to be true. Specifically, for every online order, 5 or 6 directly trackable orders are placed in stores by people who first registered online. And these are only the customers who provided us with their names online — the real impact in your stores will actually be an order of magnitude larger.
With a managed ecommerce solution, your stores gain customers of the best kind — educated consumers who have found exactly what they want online, and simply want to see the item in person in your stores and complete the transaction with a live person.
One of the biggest concerns many retailers face going online is customer theft and fraud through ecommerce transactions. At Blueport, we work with
our customers to minimize these concerns through an extensive database and fraud intercept solution for every ecommerce transaction embedded in our ecommerce platform.
Through a combination of proprietary systems and manual intervention, each individual order that comes in through the retailer’s ecommerce site is reviewed for fraud indicators prior to passing the order to their systems. Non-compliant orders are intercepted before ever reaching the retailer, significantly reducing their risk of chargebacks for ecommerce transactions.
Many of Blueport’s clients often find that their fraud rates for ecommerce transactions are lower than in their stores.
Key
features include:
- Automated Order Review – We begin by establishing a rule set against which transactions are screened, with passing orders immediately inserted in your systems.
- Manual Intervention - For ecommerce transactions that fail automated review, Blueport Commerce will contact customers and credit card companies to attempt to validate customer payment, inserting only orders that pass this second screening.
- Monitoring - We monitor accept and decline rates for retailers’ credit card and store card transactions.
Fulfillment and customer service should be a priority for every e-commerce transaction – however all ecommerce solutions are not created equal. Fulfillment becomes even more complicated for big ticket retail, or those retailers whose products do not easily fit into a UPS box.
E-commerce can't succeed in a category like big-ticket retail without a specialized technology provider. One with an e-commerce platform that’s able to process your product from order to delivery — and make it as easy as calling UPS.
How is an online order fulfilled?
Ecommerce solutions should make the process a closed loop that begins and ends with your existing systems. A platform should be able to extract your SKUs from your system, and return orders to your system in a format identical to an order written in your stores. Whether you have a home grown system or a major commercial package, the end result should be that e-commerce orders that are no different to fulfill than store orders.
Additionally, it’s important to ensure that your website only features products you can fulfill, and provides accurate local delivery dates. Dropped or discontinued products should be removed from your site automatically. Customers should be shown the same delivery dates they would get in a store, based on local stock, purchase orders or inter-store transfers.
The result is e-commerce volume that, from a service and fulfillment standpoint, is the same as store orders. Your team will know how to fulfill an e-commerce order from day one — just like a store order.
At Blueport Commerce, we are committed to respecting and integrating WITH systems, not in creating a separate e-commerce solution for you to then maintain. We believe that to be effective,
e-commerce integration is essential: your e-commerce must work seamlessly with the systems you use to run your current business.
We also understand that your systems are likely not e-commerce ready, and that you may consider them a barrier to going online. This is a challenge we've faced many times before.
Our
e-commerce platform is designed to integrate with any system— to extract what data can be found in your systems, augment it for e-commerce, then return completed e-commerce transactions to you that are indistinguishable from orders placed in your stores.
Your SKUs, your prices, your product information, enhanced and then returned as an order in your system that can be treated exactly like store orders from a fulfillment and service perspective. The result is true e-commerce integration: less work, higher customer satisfaction and a reduced need to develop separate staff or procedures for online sales.
E-commerce becomes another store, seamlessly integrated with your strategy, operations and reporting.
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