Delivering an online Christmas

Xmas-delivery

November 26, 2020

Retail has been operating at breakneck speed all year and the peak season could send that into overdrive.

After listening to the webinar delivered by Retail Week into how certain businesses can manage online demand at Xmas, it’s clear that 2020 has thrown up challenges that wouldn’t usually have been as apparent as they are today.

For certain sectors, like the toy and fashion industry, key months and dates can deliver the lion’s share of a business’s yearly demand. Toy Producer, The Entertainer and Fashion brand, Apricot, manage the festive demand as well as black Friday/Cyber Monday sales bonanzas in different ways.

For the first time Internet sales as a % of total retail sales has rarely dropped below 20% and this only looks set to increase the closer we move to Xmas.

Increasing demand is positive but businesses that don’t have the capacity to meet customer expectations run the risk of falling short.

How to manage inflated festive orders profitably

The Entertainer boss, Gary Grant, spoke of his business’s difficulty in managing inflated festive orders and shipping them accurately, on time and within budget. Interestingly, over a period of time where some sections of the retail industry have suffered, he highlighted that The Entertainer’s biggest problem isn’t demand, it is picking, packing and dispatching its online orders within budget.

At TrueCommerce we help businesses connect their sales channels, order management, and parcel carriers to simplify and optimise their shipping processes.

A common problem for any business that receives an influx of orders is fulfilment and shipping. Our cloud-based model enables organisations to rapidly scale their business to handle demand spikes, whilst functionality such as batch shipping allows for large order volumes to be processed quickly and easily.

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