Viare attends the Retail Fulfilment Summit

Retail Fulfilment summit was held in February 2023 the team from eStar and Viare attended. Listening to retailers discuss fulfilment where some great topics covered. This event is Australia’s most prominent event for the retail industry, offering sought-after case studies from leading retailers who shine light on current problems and provide insight on how to continuously improve eCommerce and fulfilment strategies.

Viare Chief Fulfilment Officer Mark Greaves spoke about leveraging your store network to drive online sales growth, improve profitability from your online channel and provide better customer experiences. Mark was joined by Dan Matenga Fulfilment Operations Manager at Briscoe Group. Briscoes Group New Zealand comprises of three brands; Briscoes Homewares, Rebel Sport, and Living & Giving. The group operates more than 90 brick and mortar stores across New Zealand and generates more than $700m in sales revenue annually. Dan spoke about how they have successfully leveraged there store network with 95% of their online volume being fulfilled from their store network and the need to invest in fulfilment to ensure fulfilment costs have not grown in line with there sales growth, improving profitability. View presentation here.

It was great for retailers to be able to have meaningful conversations with retailers from across Australia and New Zealand including some of our existing clients. There were some really good topics discussed at the summit, some key take aways for us were:

• The importance of the customer, and while we all talk about this it is our actions that really show how we treat our customers. A good quote from one of the sessions was if you really are putting the customer first you will be willing to lose money to fix a problem for a customer.
• The importance of whole business pulling in the same direction when it comes to online fulfilment. One retailer talked about how everyday the marketing team talked with the fulfilment teams, and they would adjust the marketing spend based on how the fulfilment teams were going, if they were behind reduce marketing spend and if had capacity increasing. Doing this to ensure that all customers get a positive fulfilment experience. Why would you take more orders when your fulfilment teams are behind?
• Improving fulfilment requires a whole team approach working together, with the likes of digital and marketing understanding the fulfilment teams challenges and vice versa. You will only solve and improve customer experience if you are working as a team, no one division can solve fulfilment challenges.
• Technology is key and you are only as good as your weakest link in your tech stack. Many businesses are also not using the full potential of the tools they select, in part due to not being able to due to the weakest link
• Cost is a real concern, and how you find ways to improve efficiency while still improving customer experience is going to be key
• eCommerce scaled significantly important to get fulfilment running smoothly

If you didn’t quite make it this year, get in touch with the Viare team who will be more than happy to discuss your online fulfilment with you.