As Amazon gets stronger and competition rises, you need to continually find ways to reduce expenses and improve the customer experience. Drawn from hundreds of operations blogs we have written for Multichannel Merchant, here are 13 ways to make your fulfillment operations more efficient and improve performance.
Selecting the right online marketplace for your ecommerce business is a tough choice. Partnering with the right marketplace holds the greatest potential for success. But which one do you choose? In our latest MCM CommerceChat podcast, Dennis Worth, Vice President of Business Development for Seta Corp., discusses best practices in marketplace selection and how his business has benefited, and shares tips on how to make the marketplace adoption process go smoothly.
Never content to rest on last week’s disruption, Amazon is now offering online order pickup at select Whole Foods Market stores, including curbside delivery, all for Prime members in an effort to boost membership and gain more territory in the escalating grocery wars.
Kroger, demonstrating why it is a force to be reckoned with in e-grocery, is now offering same-day delivery in five markets, while also testing out self-driving delivery in a Phoenix pilot and creating automated distribution centers with partner Ocado.
A group of interested parties including Amazon and the National Retail Federation has formed a coalition to lobby on behalf of the U.S. Postal Service in advance of an Aug. 10 report from a USPS task force formed this spring by President Donald Trump.
Less than a year into a pilot program that had employees making local deliveries of online orders, Walmart in January all but quashed the program quietly as associate buy-in wasn’t happening. See how it’s still happening at one Georgia store, and other ways Walmart is working to figure out local fulfillment of ecommerce orders.
BoxLock, a smart lock startup, is aiming to address the growing problem of porch piracy by securing ecommerce deliveries through barcode scanning by parcel carriers. It went live on Prime Day and is exclusive to Prime members but that’s bound to change as the solution catches on.
A survey by JDA Software found that more than half of U.S. consumers – 52% – ran into technical difficulties during Prime Day. Of that group, 27% either gave up without making a purchase or bought less than they had planned. Amazon is also facing allegations of raising prices on some products, with the FTC looking into it.
Flexing its Whole Foods Market muscles, Amazon announced an expansion of same-day grocery delivery in New York and three cities in Florida, after Walmart’s Jet.com and FreshDirect both announced plans for fulfillment centers in the Bronx, NY.
Flytrex, an Israeli company that developed a control system for automatic drone flight, may soon be helping deliver food to residents of a North Carolina town as one of 10 FAA-sanctioned test projects. As the first company to launch commercial drone delivery in Iceland, Flytrex is looking to expand the service to other countries.