Automation Key For The Omni-Channel SMR

By Erin Harris, Editor-In-Chief, Cell & Gene
Follow Me On Twitter @ErinHarris_1

May 2015 Integrated Solutions For Retailers

An inventory and order management system helped a specialty retailer automate its processes and strengthen its mom-and-pop personal appeal.

Brett’s Luggage has been an omni-channel retailer since it launched its e-commerce site, Suitcase.com, in 1995. Suitcase. com performed well until 9/11 and the recession of 2001, at which point business slowed, as travel was neither affordable nor a priority. As a result, CEO John Ebb needed to rethink the business, especially the e-commerce site.

Whether customers shop in-store at Brett’s Luggage or online at Suitcase.com, customers can expect a pleasant, tailored experience that helps them purchase the right luggage for their specific travel needs. Getting into e-commerce in the 1990s was important for the business, but in order to boost business as well as drive search engine relevancy and visibility for Suitcase. com, in 2007, Ebb overhauled the company’s existing back end system with Magento, an open source e-commerce platform. The change helped Suitcase.com see an uptick in SEO (search engine optimization) and online orders, but the increase in online orders created a fulfillment problem. “Every time we received an order, an employee had to handpick and ship the order or contact the vendor to ship the order,” laments Ebb. “We had a full-time employee dedicated solely to this manual process; there were too many touch points and too many opportunities for errors, especially during the holiday season, when our volume is four times that of the rest of the year. We needed an automated solution to save time and avoid errors. And we wanted a cloud-based solution to help us keep track of our inventory, to process orders quickly, and to integrate with QuickBooks.” Further, approximately 60 percent of Suitcase.com’s business is through EDI (electronic data interchange), which at the time was also a multistep, error-prone process.

Order And Inventory Management Keys To Long-Term Success
With Magento as the retailer’s e-commerce platform, Ebb wanted an inventory and order management solution that would integrate with it. Ebb chose Freestyle Commerce (Freestyle) from Freestyle Solutions, which is a cloud-based inventory and order management software that integrates with Magento and Amazon. Now, Ebb can manage and synchronize product details and images directly to and from Freestyle and keep online inventory information up to date. Associates can look up inventory by description, product SKU, user-defined products tags, sales channel, or supplier. Inventory is synced automatically across the brick-and-mortar and e-commerce channels. Freestyle keeps Ebb’s customers informed with in-stock, committed, back-ordered, packed, or shipped items, and partial orders are managed by customer preference (i.e. ship the in-stock items ahead of the back-ordered items). Ebb’s team can view all orders from Magento, as orders are downloaded automatically. Freestyle syncs with QuickBooks and moves the transactional data from invoices and purchase orders, as well as creating new, or appending information to existing, customer records. Freestyle automatically transfers EDI data so that Ebb’s team may dedicate time to other value-added tasks. And Ebb no longer needs to employ an associate full time to manage and ship orders.

Ebb states he’s very pleased with the solution as well as the partnership with Freestyle Solutions. “I’ve been operating this business since 1976,” says Ebb. “We’re a small business, but we are not one channel. Therefore, I need to know everything about everything; what to do when the phone or the Internet goes down, what to do when the lights go out, etc. It’s good to have a vendor partner that works with me to accommodate our inventory and order management needs.”

For More Information On Freestyle Solutions Go To www.freestylesolutions.com