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Product Substitution: How Savvy Retailers and Manufacturers can Build Supply Chain Resiliency, Reduce Costs and Improve Customer Experiences

Retail TouchPoints

When customers place ecommerce orders, the last thing they want is an unhappy surprise. Shipping delays and stockouts lead to frustration and disappointment, especially when logistical problems impact time-sensitive purchases, such as special occasion gifts, event tickets or prescription medications.

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Want to Cut the Cost of Fast Fulfillment? It All Starts with Inventory Placement

Retail TouchPoints

The problems with getting products to people quickly and cheaply are well-known: consumers want fast fulfillment, which is costly to provide, but they don’t want to pay high (or really any) shipping fees. Even Amazon , the trendsetter in fast fulfillment, isn’t immune to higher labor costs. Unemployment is at 3.5%

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Can Nearshoring Prevent the Next Supply Chain Crisis?

Retail TouchPoints

Just as you don’t start worrying about your hot water heater’s performance until you get shocked by an icy-cold shower, most of us — even inside the retail industry — don’t think about supply chains until they stop working. This is excepting, of course, the professionals tasked with maintaining and operating those supply chains.)

Supplies 288
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Building Loyalty Without Breaking the Bottom Line: the Dual Shipping Dilemma for Ecommerce Merchants

Retail TouchPoints

While this is good news for many ecommerce retailers, it has also become more and more expensive to deliver those goods to customers. This means that it’s not enough for products to be delivered quickly – customers also want to know that if those items aren’t quite what they expected, they can be returned just as quickly and easily.

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Alibaba Supply Chain Exec Recommends Futureproofing with AI, Blockchain and Crowdsourcing

Retail TouchPoints

But the supply chain disruptions that it exacerbated have not fallen by the wayside as easily as disposable masks did, with the global movement of goods continuing to be impacted by one challenge after another — from war and terrorist attacks to drought. The COVID-19 pandemic has, for all intents and purposes, ended.

Supplies 227
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Retailers Increasingly Turning to Third-Party Resources to Handle Fulfillment

Retail TouchPoints

Store-based fulfillment of customer orders got an enormous boost during the COVID pandemic, when both curbside pickup and delivery offerings became survival tactics for so many retailers. However, they are now being prized for their practical capabilities as well: 38% cited faster, more cost-effective shipping, up from 21% in 2022.

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Harnessing the Potential of Returnless Refunds to Improve Profitability and Customer Experience

Retail TouchPoints

Returns are a major cost of doing retail business of any kind, but especially online. Common missteps that mismanage customer expectations include inaccurate online product descriptions, low-quality images, lack of inventory visibility or accuracy and inadequate sizing details.