Oh Ship! What about Personalization?

Minisoft partner Enspire Commerce just dropped a white paper with easily one of the best titles around: “Oh Ship! You’re Promoting Ship From Store – Now What?” Beyond the playful title, the white paper is an excellent road map for developing a successful ship from store strategy.

So, first things first: what is ship from store? According to Enspire Commerce, “Instead of fulfilling orders from distribution centers potentially long distances away from customers, orders are fulfilled at the retail stores themselves and shipped directly to the customer.” This has obvious benefits, such as leveraging in-store inventory to streamline a company’s existing business process, creating a more seamless customer experience. Now, what specifically does a successful ship from store implementation require?

According to Enspire Commerce, the three main pillars are store operations, order routing and metrics. Of course, having a customer-driven store fulfillment strategy was of particular interest to us here at Minisoft. The white paper noted that part of conducting store operations with a customer focus, “should transition to personalizing the customer experience.” Personalization has become something of a buzzword lately. Although it can be somewhat creepy when it’s done the wrong way, personalization doesn’t have to be invasive and weird. Quite the opposite, nobody minds the ‘Recommended for you’ or ‘You may also like’ features employed by many online retailers. Why can’t this hallmark of the digital channel be brought to the ultimate physical channel – the package?

The white paper pointed out that “Not only can sales associates include handwritten notes in their packaging, but some companies are even including personalized packing slips, which can include promotions, in an effort to drive future engagement or product suggestions based on customer profiles.” Not to shamelessly promote ourselves (although this is our blog!), we’ve discussed this personalization revolution in shipping at length in recent years.

Of course, Minisoft isn’t just reporting from the sidelines. We’re excited to actively be at the forefront of this retail revolution, as our eFORMz software solution has helped retailers optimize and streamline their existing processes to generate a wide range of outbound shipping documents. This includes empowering retailers to include relevant offers and promotions, such as special offers, targeted cross-sells, upsells, gift cards, redeem only in store coupons, loyalty rewards and web promotions, incorporated on every package.

To be sure, we’ve only scratched the surface of Enspire Commerce’s delightful white paper, but it goes without saying that we highly recommend it. To download it, please visit the following link: Oh Ship! You’re Promoting Ship From Store – Now What?