What: implementing ship-from-store was a necessary test and try implementation during pandemic and lockdowns.

Why it is important: A Global Tranz survey shows that 41% of retailers were not prepared to shift store locations into fulfillment hubs, however, most of them had to do so to make the most of their closed stores and blocked inventory. The difficulties and costs associated with such an operation might not make it the ideal recipe for every retailer, or every location.

In the US, retailers were faced during the pandemic to a double challenge: what to do with goods blocked in closed stores, and how to fulfill orders from e-commerce channel when it is equally affected? As shown in the IADS White Paper (Global Pandemic and local department stores: learnings from Covid-19, released 2020), all retailers had to quickly adapt to ship-from-store operations, just like our members did. This created a bottleneck at two levels:

• How to manage the store and allocate needed resource to the ship-from-store operations: staffing, inventory technology, space, and apparently simple staples such as packaging (SM Stores got around this with their “Call to Deliver” initiative by simply using the store packaging and not the dedicated e-commerce one)
• How to manage logistics: according to Supply Chain diver, 74% of respondents to their study mentioned that they would be willing to externalise the outbound deliveries, as this is entirely different from inbound inventory management.

However, the right recipe remains to be found, as costs of operation in Ship-from-store is still today higher than other omnichannel or regular instore proceedings. For that reason, it might not be a path to be taken by all retailers, or for all their stores.

 Retailers face operational, logistical hurdles in pandemic-driven switch to ship from store