Ship-from-Store Retail Strategy

What is Ship-from-Store?

With Ship from Store, your customers can place orders through your online store and the orders are routed by Salesforce Order Management to the most appropriate physical store for fulfillment, based on inventory availability, customer location, and logistic operations optimization.

The ship-from-store functionality allows clients to optimize their inventory across different sources for BOPIS orders. The ability to move stock from one source to another enables clients to manage orders with out-of-stock products at the collection point and request a source to ship them to the destination source for the customer.

Ship-from-store is distinct from in-store pickup and curbside pickup, as it does not require the customer to travel to a store, but rather ships the order to the end customer from the retail location.

How does Ship-from-Store work?

These are the 3 steps for the Ship-from-Store process:

1. An online shopper places an order on a retail website (or one of the other various online channels) and chooses a delivery time and date. The checkout process must be synced with the store inventory and locations in order to guarantee that the supply chain can meet the requested time and date.
2. Retail stores manage the entire order fulfillment process. This includes pulling the inventory from shelves, staging, packing, and preparing for shipment.
3. The customer receives the order quickly due to the proximity of the physical store to their location.

Benefits of Ship-from-Store

1. Power-on-demand delivery Shipping products locally can enable same-day delivery across many different geographies. This offering can help a company gain a competitive foothold in its market and sell to more consumers looking for fast fulfillment.

2. Reduce shipping costs In a ship-from-store model, as opposed to ship-from-warehouse, shipping costs are naturally reduced as carriers are delivering locally.

3. Increase service level for customers Ship-from-store enables short delivery times and even next, or same-day deliveries. In the case of online orders, the cross-store use of products also expands the range, resulting in a greater choice for customers.

4. Scaling eCommerce through flexible fulfillment By processing online orders through stores, it is easier to balance fluctuations in demand and optimize store profitability.

5. Replace local store inventory quickly Using a ship-from-store model helps brands to move more inventory, more easily, by fulfilling online orders according to exactly what they need to get rid of. Chains with a large number of locations within a relatively short distance have higher volumes of stock available locally and can juggle store inventory to work in their favor.

6. Support Omnichannel fulfillment Omnichannel Inventory provides a scalable inventory solution that delivers real-time inventory availability at the location level across all your fulfillment channels.

Why is Ship-from-Store gaining in popularity?

Consumers today want their eCommerce orders to arrive fast, but retail companies can’t keep up with the demand.