Is this situation familiar? You invest your time and energy developing products for the market, and develop a supply chain model to ensure these new products make it to customers in a timely manner. Then, you invest further in well-crafted brand promises implemented to the finest detail within your style guide. Next, you transfer the whole bundle to the OEM and ask: “when can we start shipping?”. Rarely, up to this point, has any thought been given to transit packaging. Let’s be honest – the feeling is, you have invested all that time in developing the product, how hard can it be to get the package right? Famous last words indeed.
Is packaging the magic ingredient in your global supply chain? It certainly has the power to make or break your global operations.
Most retailers are missing out on a major opportunity for cost savings in their supply chain. It’s not because the opportunity is complicated - quite the contrary. The idea is so simple most retailers probably think it’s already being handled. But when you’re talking about shipping from Asia, what you think is happening and what is actually happening with your packaging material, performance specifications and freight utilization are rarely the same. So, what do you do?
In the age of the consumer, every retailer must create the exceptional Amazon-like service experiences that consumers have come to expect or risk going out of business.
Intense competition and heightened consumer expectations aren’t unique challenges to the mid-market retailer. There’s one critical difference, mid-market retailers lack the resources that the biggest players do have to overcome those challenges. With already small margins, if you’re among this group, you may find yourself just scraping by. But the odds don’t have to be stacked against you.
It’s a jungle out there and retailers are in a fight for survival of the fittest—just ask some of the casualties. This isn’t fear mongering. It is a retail reality being driven by table stakes set by the likes of Amazon.
In a world where retailers are losing $77 million in revenue per day due to eCommerce fraud globally, you better have the right fraud prevention strategy in place if you expect to survive. But should you use a third-party fraud management solution or build your own fraud team in-house?
Amazon has achieved massive growth through a simple yet strategic business concept: the flywheel. However, the problem with a flywheel is that when one part breaks down, the overall system can fail rapidly. At least one of the core pieces of Amazon’s flywheel—the customer experience—is already under pressure. While this may have profound consequences for Amazon, there are larger implications for the rest of the eCommerce ecosystem.
Delivering exceptional customer care in a world where most consumers expect to be able to pick up where they left off when they contact customer service isn’t easy. Consumers want a seamless experience when they need support, and they are quick to both reward and punish retailers based on their performance.
The consumer goods to retail supply chain has clearly been the most prominent and quite arguably the most important sector of the supply chain for decades.