Firing back at Amazon’s move less than three weeks ago, Walmart is now offering free next-day delivery to customers in Phoenix and Las Vegas, with plans to expand to Southern California within days and 75% of the U.S. population by the end of the year. Walmart’s deal is mostly free: There’s a $35 order value threshold to qualify.
No sooner had everyone mostly adjusted to the new normal of two-day delivery across the continental U.S. than Amazon raised the bar yet again, signaling a move to free one-day shipping for its 100 million-plus Prime members. Amazon will be transitioning to one-day Prime delivery throughout 2019, starting in Q2.
While seeking to make every customer experience an outstanding one, you have to be careful not to have your company’s approach driven by a few unhappy voices, executives from Birchbox and Belk told attendees at Ecommerce Operations Summit.
Adding a weapon in its competition with FedEx and UPS in eight Southern states, Texas-based regional carrier LSO has added route optimization and enhanced tracking and visibility through a partnership with software provider Bringg. See what capabilities this brings as well as enhanced productivity and efficiency for LSO.
It’s about time retailers drop the term omnichannel from their vocabulary. Creating an omnichannel experience is not even that difficult. What is much harder is giving your customers a reason to shop, a belief that you are looking out for and providing them with unique experiences that they appreciate.
Shoppers want visibility into the entire order fulfillment process, from accurate availability at purchase to tracking updates. Fulfillment visibility is no longer a nice-to-have but a must-to-compete in ecommerce and improve your bottom line. Here’s how increased inventory visibility improves customer satisfaction and the bottom line.
Nearly all supply chain managers responding to a recent survey by Convey and eft Supply Chain and Logistics Business Intelligence said they consider customer experience to be important when measuring last-mile performance, while two-thirds of them say they’re held accountable for standard customer experience KPIs.
To succeed, retailers and ecommerce companies need to meet heightened customer experience demands. That means offering fast shipping, free returns and same-day delivery, if possible. Learn insights from industry experts on ways to optimize your fulfillment network and focus your technology investments to compete and win.
Though Amazon’s dominance of ecommerce may bring about feelings of doom or gloom, many retailers do not realize the influence they have to capture buyers before they default to Amazon. The key to achieving success is through providing omnichannel options that the ecommerce behemoth can’t match.
What areas of omnichannel operations need improvement? What challenges and opportunities are retailers facing? Charles Dimov of OrderDynamics, discusses his company’s recent research in this MCM CommerceChat podcast, and will go into greater depth at Ecommerce Operations Summit 2019, April 9-11 in Columbus, OH.