The Gift Of Wow: Preparing Your Store For The Holiday Season

Being prepared for the holiday rush used to mean stocking shelves and making sure your associates were ready for the long hours. But the digital revolution has changed everything, most importantly, customer expectations. Retailers with a physical store presence should be asking themselves—what am I doing to wow the customer?

Now, more than ever, consumers expect seamless shopping, cross-channel order fulfillment and customer service. So how do you wow a customer that already has soaring expectations? Innovative retailers are differentiating themselves by transforming the in-store experience. This requires a modern IT infrastructure with flawless inventory visibility across all internal and external sources of supply, and evolving store operations. Here are three steps to prepare your business for this season’s holiday shopper, and beyond.

Inventory Visibility

Real-time, enterprise-wide inventory visibility is key to enabling a buy-anywhere, fulfill-anywhere experience. To that end, a centralized order management solution must unify with other key systems, including ecommerce, point-of-sale (POS), financials, inventory management and warehouse management. With seamless connections across the business, merchants increase order velocity, reduce inventory and reduce order cycle times, getting products to customers quicker and with less overhead. More productive stores also reduce shipping costs and accelerate product delivery by leveraging stores for both pickup locations and fulfillment centers, powered by intelligent order management.