What: Retailers and brands are investing in store fulfilment and smaller and more nimble warehouses near shoppers to meet customer demand more sustainably and efficiently.

Why is it important: Micro-fulfilment strategies mean retailers can ship and deliver goods faster, but overhauling a distribution network is a daunting and expensive task for retailers.

To facilitate this transition, a number of tech companies are helping brands get up to speed.

PredictSpring has built a mobile point-of-sale interface for store associates to prepare a package for click-and-collect or e-commerce shipment. These types of tools will soon become as ubiquitous and necessary as payment systems and e-commerce platform.

A key component of micro-fulfilment is rethinking the role of the retail store, which now needs to function like a warehouse and bricks-and-mortar shop. Large beauty and fashion brands have a prolific real estate footprint, so they want to leverage that says Maggie Barnett, COO of ShipHero.

PredictSpring predicts that soon, any metro area with more than one million people will see that the majority of orders are fulfilled from stores, rather than warehouses. Flexibility at checkout in how customers can receive their orders, including buy online, pickup in store or ship from store, is increasingly important.

This puts a further burden on retail associates, who are already expanding expertise to include video shopping consultations, personal styling and online customer service inquiries. A key concern among ShipHero’s customers, is the ability to train associates to scale these services, including packing and shipping e-commerce orders.

Relying on stores more to fulfil online orders also changes the role of the warehouse. Flexe connects brands with a network of more than 1 500 warehouse locations in North America who have free space. Brands can be set up within three weeks, don’t have long-term commitments and can specify packaging. For example, if a brand like Nike wanted to do a drop with two-day or same-day delivery, it could set up temporary fulfilment locations outside of key cities.

Storing products closer to the customer is more important than ever, but allocating inventory can become a “bottleneck”, says Ben Eachus, co-founder and CEO of Flowspace, a logistics platform. Something that can help is inventory visibility, where individual products are tagged to show exactly where they are at any given time.

Forget mega warehouses