Australian fashion retailer Glue StoreÂ’s new commerce platform provided their young, mobile customers with more convenience while making their distribution channels work more efficiently and bringing down costs
In 2014, after reviewing potential solutions, Glue Store chose to implement Fluent Commerce’s cloud-based platform. The Glue Store team adopted Fluent Commerce’s Click & Collect offering, Ship to Store and Home Delivery, meaning that regardless of whether a customer wanted to buy in-store or at home online, they could choose to pick up their purchase from a store or have them delivered to their home.
By utilising both store and warehouse stock to fulfil any online order they immediately opened up the opportunity for higher fulfilment rates, increased sell-through and lower costs of fulfilment.
Once the store associate acknowledges and receives the orders, they get the products ready for the customers. Labels are automatically generated, with courier bookings for Home Delivery orders seamlessly being booked via the user friendly in-store Fluent Commerce system.
The branded emails and SMS communications sent at all key events of the order lifecycle ensure that customers are constantly kept up to date. It all works together to provide a seamless and consistent brand experience.
Integrating channels
Glue Store’s use of Fluent Commerce’s native cloud technology ensures there is accuracy across their online and offline inventory levels, so that aged stock can be identified and
sell-through increased, reducing or eliminating costs required for stock consolidation and in turn making space for the arrival of new stock.
By opening the store stock pool for online orders alongside the stock from the distribution centre, Glue Store immediately provided their customers with a broader choice of items to choose from.
This ensures Glue Store avoids situations where the ecommerce site is showing out-of-stock for an item currently on backorder in the data centre, but where a store has the item available for sale. End-of-season clearance sales are also maximised, by reducing the requirement of store-to-store shipping for order fulfilment and inventory balancing, in turn reducing costs.
A key focus for Glue Store was to enhance their customer promise and they have achieved this through utilising stores to fulfil Home Delivery orders. By sending orders from stores closer to the customer, rather than from the distribution centre at the other end of the country, they increase efficiency and ensure speedier and more convenient deliveries.
Fluent Commerce’s in-store collection process has been designed for simplicity for both staff and customers. This enables the store staff to quickly and easily locate items and confirm the customer’s identity, meaning they can spend more time on cross-sell and up-sell opportunities.
Technology ROI
Prior to the implementation of the Fluent Commerce platform in 2015, key metrics and benchmarks were developed. Metrics include: conversion rates, abandon cart rates, in-store fulfilment rates, time to fulfil online orders
in-store, customer service lodgements, delivery times and number of shipments per order.
Stores which fall outside of acceptable levels can easily be identified and engaged with to ensure customer experience is maintained to the highest possible levels.
In-store fulfilment through both Click & Collect and Ship from Store initiatives for example has improved online conversions by increasing the stock availability online by almost 200%.
