Roll out strategy: BOPIS with integrations

As we all know, BOPIS has become an important omni-channel journey and brands are always ready to have this journey enabled. Post COVID, customer shopping experiences have a wide impact on retail business, especially fashion retail brands.

If you are also planning to roll out BOPIS for your brand, integration challenges can be a nightmare in case you have multiple sales channels (storefront, POS etc) feeding orders to another OMS platform for routing and further proceedings.

The backbone of BOPIS, real time inventory, is promised by most omni-channel solutions but there can be cases where stores fail to fulfil item pickup requests because the inventory is damaged or worn or missing. In this case when the customer walks in for the pickup, they don't get it. This can result in customer dissatisfaction, which obviously no one wants.

BOPIS is not only just "Buy Online, Pickup In Store", it is a seamless customer experience expected from your brand. To provide this experience, technology can empower retailers to make the right decisions at the right time. Have a separate BOPIS app installed at stores, talking directly to your OMS system, so that your online BOPIS orders can be notified to stores in real time. Here is a recommended BOPIS flow that can be adopted for a seamless customer experience:

• When a customer orders an item for store pickup, they select the store where they will pick up the order. Show store inventory online so the customer doesn’t select a store without inventory.
• After the order is placed, due to unavoidable practical hindrances, there can be scenarios where stores cannot fulfil BOPIS orders. Use the BOPIS app to get an inventory confirmation from stores to the OMS. After getting the confirmation, the OMS can reserve inventory. 
• Once inventory is reserved, notify the customer that the order is ready for pickup. The store will pack the order and when the customer arrives, hand it over to them. 
• If the store associate finds that order cannot be fulfilled, they notify the OMS immediately using the BOPIS app. The customer is notified that the item cannot be picked up from the store and has options to either provide an address to get the item delivered or cancel the order.
• Experts advice, it's always better to notify customers upfront in such situations and give choices. These types of customer engagements have proven to be key for brand loyalty.
• If the customer chooses to cancel the order. This is better than a customer walking into the store and not receiving the item and gets frustrated.
• If the customer wishes to get the item delivered, then the OMS can route the order to the best fulfilment centre (as per routing rules), which could be a warehouse or a retail store, finally shipping it to the customer’s address.

An OMS should also enable store associates with future inventory view, so that customers can be notified accordingly to come for pickup. In this manner your replenishment planning and future inventory visibility plays a critical role in a successful omni-channel customer journey. I will give more details on this topic in a future post.

There are various perspectives on the meaning of Omni-channel. For customers it's just a better experience. It's important that your OMS handles corner cases because they are the deciding factors of your overall order volume growth.