Buying items online is a convenient way to shop, but delivery times often dampen the experience. While some retailers offer next-day delivery, the majority still require customers to wait anywhere from a few days to a few weeks to receive items. This is made even worse when supply chain woes hit certain markets, leaving customers to wait a month or longer for ordered items to arrive.
One way that retailers are tackling these concerns is through the buy-online-deliver-from-store (BODFS) model. Using this model, customers order items online and receive deliveries from local stores instead of from a central warehouse.
While this model doesn’t work for every retailer, the ones that use BODFS have seen a lot of success. Below are three benefits of using BODFS in retail:
1. Faster Delivery
The biggest benefit of ship-from-store delivery models is that they allow customers to get items faster. When you use a traditional warehouse-based shipping model, items may need to ship from across the country despite the same items being available at local stores in the customer’s area. Using a ship-from-store delivery scheme, customers can often receive items within the same day or even within hours of placing an order.
2. Fulfills the Need for Emergency Items
When a customer orders certain items, they are sometimes doing so because they need the items as soon as possible. Medications, baby items, cleaning supplies, and more may all be considered emergency items depending on the need. A BODFS model can get important items to customers quickly in an emergency.
3. Items Can Still Be Sold in Stores
When a retailer operates physical storefronts in addition to online stores, it needs to keep inventory in both places. If the inventory is moving online but not in a store or vice versa, the inventory and inventory space end up being wasted.
By operating through a BODFS model, inventories from the warehouse and physical stores are synced, allowing a retailer to see where inventory exists at any given time. Items can still be sold in stores even if these items are not selling online. If inventory gets low in one location, the other can supply additional inventory to balance things out.
Author Resource:-
Jeson Clarke is providing info about single platform for your hotshot, scheduled, daily route, and freight deliveries. You can find his thoughts at last-mile delivery solutions blog.