Consumers are certainly demanding (and enjoying) flexible fulfillment options for their online orders but at what expensive to retailers?
Aptos (formerly Epicor Retail) recently released data that indicates retailers spend a staggering 18 cents of every dollar to satisfy today's customer expectations of buy anywhere, pick up anywhere. To put that number into perspective, Epicor applied the reported 18 percent fulfillment costs per order to the estimated $3.07 billion in online sales from Cyber Monday 2015. Using that number, Epicor estimates U.S. retailers would have spent $540,000,000 on that single day to get their products into customers' hands.
According to the study, 8 in 10 retailers surveyed reported an increase in order management and fulfillment costs compared to last year, with an average YoY increase of 5.07 percent.
"This study is a huge wakeup call to retailers," said Noel Goggin, CEO and culture leader of Aptos. "As traditional store-based purchases continue to decrease and omnichannel transactions continue to increase, 'runaway' order management and fulfillment costs have the potential to devastate the bottom line of retailers in virtually every category."
To use this information to their own advantage, retailers can use Aptos's Quickscan offering to help them assess the maturity of their order management systems (it's free to use but requires an email or social sign-on to access results).