Winning Strategies for E-Comm THE DIVIDE BETWEEN RETAILERS THAT WERE ALREADY ON THE RIGHT TRACK AND THOSE THAT AREN’T CONTINUES TO GROW WITH THE ADDED PRESSURE OF FULFILLING ONLINE ORDERS. G L E N N TAY LO R
F
or nearly a year now, retailers have had to manage an endless barrage of e-commerce orders at a rate they had never expected to handle so quickly. And adaptation remains daunting—as recently as February, 56 percent of retailers said that fulfilling growing online demand is their top business challenge, according to a Retail Systems Research (RSR) survey. According to the survey of 160 retailers, another 52 percent have trouble with keeping forecasts in sync with changing demand. The fact that long-established and highly efficient trade routes were completely shut down for months on end—coupled with a full upending of worker and product safety protocols— only compounded these problems. To boot, retailers that were adding more SKUs online to match increasing e-commerce demand already had a tough time differentiating for localization, as the processes and systems that supported the old model focused on scale do not adequately support this new model, which involves getting more of the right products to the right demographic of consumers.
14 / 2021 INVENTORY REPORT
Since it has become more difficult to “delight” shoppers in their path to purchase, retailers can’t afford to think of 2020 as an anomaly, RSR warned.
THE WINNERS AND LOSERS DIVIDE The gap between retail’s winners and losers always comes down to how they approach handling these challenges, especially in this new era. To address the problem of excess demand, 76 percent of “retail winners” said strategically placing inventory throughout the supply chain to better fulfill customer needs is a top opportunity for the industry. However, only 29 percent of the others felt this inventory placement was a necessity. These retail winners, which are defined by RSR as seeing more than 4.5 percent yearover-year annual sales growth for the three years preceding 2020, understand the importance of having inventory exactly where it needs to be and when it needs to be there. Gaps like this exist across numerous approaches, with 50 percent of winners seeing the reduction of waste and inventory shrink
