BOPIS may not be a new concept any longer; rather, it is an expectation of customers. It has the best of both worlds: the convenience of online shopping and the immediate satisfaction of a local store. But when a customer orders, pulls up to your place, and is greeted with a slapped forehead and an I’m sorry, then the promise is violated. This is not only a loss of a sale, but it also kills customer trust.
This guide provides the answer to the most burning questions about why even well-intentioned BOPIS systems fail and shows the ultimate solution to ensure that every order is a success.
What is the single biggest reason my BOPIS orders are failing?
The top reason that BOPIS systems fail is, quite simply, bad inventory accuracy.
You have two versions of reality operating in your e-commerce site and in your physical store. Your website claims to be selling something out of a database, but that database does not reflect what you actually have on your shelves. This mismatch has been commonly referred to as phantom inventory or ghost stock.
According to a report commissioned by McKinsey, one of the main pain points of establishing a seamless omnichannel experience is that it is disconnected. When a customer purchases a phantom item, the purchase is doomed before the very beginning.
How does my inventory become so inaccurate in the first place?
There are seldom single events that lead to inventory mistakes. It is a slow decline that modern retail cannot maintain due to old-fashioned processes that are not keeping up.
- Wave counts: The majority of retailers only record a complete count of physical inventory once or twice a year due to its extremely time-consuming and labor-intensive nature. These counts begin to make your data less and less reliable.
- Limitations of barcodes: Barcodes are too convenient for stockout, but not for cycle counting. They need to have a direct view of sight, one must be scanned at a time, and cannot detect the status of anything missing in the stockroom or inside an in-receiving box.
- Shrinkage and Misplacement: Things are stolen, damaged, or just in the wrong place. Unless you have a real-time tracking system, these items will stay active in your system as available till the next manual audit, generating phantom inventory weeks or months.
Under those techniques, typically retailers cannot achieve an accuracy rate of 6075 of the inventory, which is too low to be trusted to fulfill a BOPIS promise.
What is the true cost of a single failed BOPIS order?
It is way higher than the price of the item. A bad order slices away your business in many ways:
- Loss of Customer Trust: Having a BOPIS order that failed is a promise that was broken. The customer has taken some time and energy to visit your store. Studies have found that once a customer has an unpleasant fulfillment experience, they will most likely never give you a second chance with their money.
- Wasted Labor and Resources: This is because your employees have to pause productive work and waste precious time trying to find the item in the stockroom and sales floor that might not even exist. This frustrates your team and is not efficient for your business.
- Harmful Brand Reputation: With the Internet and social media, a negative experience of one client could be discussed by thousands of individuals, causing a considerable and irreparable brand loss.
How does RFID technology provide the definitive fix for this problem?
BOPIS failure has a direct root cause (incorrect data) that Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology targets. It bridges the distances between the data you keep digitally and the real world.
It works in the following way: A small RFID tag is stuck to every item. With a single handheld reader, an employee is able to scan a whole rack, whole shelves, and whole stockrooms within minutes, not days. The radio signals of hundreds of tags per second are picked up by the reader without line of sight.
This ability makes you able to:
- Improve Inventory Accuracy to 99%+: RFID enables you to see an almost perfect, real-time picture of your entire inventory by making it simple to perform daily or weekly cycle counts.
- Get rid of Phantom Inventory: you are able to know within a short period of time the misplaced items or discrepancies created by theft, and incorporate this information into your system, which you can actually trust.
You can be sure with 99 percent accuracy that a product that appears on your online store can be physically present to serve your customer. RFID transforms the BOPIS gamble into a trust-building, sure, and sound guarantee.
FAQs
Is RFID too expensive or complex for a small or medium-sized business?
Although RFID used to appear too expensive, tags and hardware have become much more affordable. Calculation is the most valuable Return on investment (ROI). When you include the price of lost sales of failed BOPIS, wasted labor, and the reputation of your brand, the price of not correcting the problem is usually much greater. One of the less effective strategies would be to roll it out on a pilot basis in just one category of products before rolling it out on a large scale.
How quickly will we see an improvement in our BOPIS performance?
The increase in your data accuracy is nearly instant. When you start tagging your items and you train your team on the easy scanning process, then you can have 99% accuracy with the first full count. This implies that your online inventory accuracy will soar in a few days, and the number of canceled or unsuccessful BOPIS orders will reduce rapidly and significantly.
Does RFID only improve BOPIS, or are there other benefits?
The benefit that BOPIS fixing is the most visible; however, it is only the tip of the iceberg. What gives a solid BOPIS system its working potential is the same underlying inventory accuracy that stimulates just about all the other processes in your retail store. This involves making it easy to deliver ship-from-store fulfillment, optimizing your supply chain, decreasing shrinkage, and giving your store associates the information that helps them better serve customers.
