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Ship from store

Overview

  • Learn how to get started with a ship from store strategy using DHL Express Commerce.
  • This guide covers how to approach setting up ship from store, including the platforms you might want to have in place.

Table of contents

What is ship from store?

Ship from store is a shipping approach where you use your brick-and-mortar inventory to meet orders originating from your online sales platforms, such as Shopify or BigCommerce.

Basically, when a customer makes a purchase through an online store, the order is routed to a physical store for fulfillment rather than being processed at a centralised warehouse. Ship from store aims to reduce order fulfillment times and, in some cases, lower transportation expenses. It can also help to reduce deadstock by improving inventory turnover.

Why ship from store?

When implemented correctly, a ship from store strategy reduces delivery times by utilising local retail inventory for online orders. This strategy enhances customer satisfaction, minimises shipping costs, and optimises inventory management. Additionally, it leverages your brick-and-mortar stores as distribution hubs, streamlining your supply chain and ensuring efficient and timely order fulfillment.

To back this up, one study from Newstore found that 68% of customers reported convenient fulfillment options such as buying from one store, while collecting from another, were at the top of their list of buying considerations.

Here are some of the other benefits:

  • Keep freight costs down: Shipping from store is a great way to combat rising freight costs if you have a network of stores, but don’t have multiple fulfilment centres.
  • Improve inventory turnover and reduce deadstock: Fulfilling online orders using retail stock means higher inventory turnover (less ageing stock). It also helps you to avoid the issue of deadstock.
  • Increase delivery speed: Ship from store is a great way to improve your delivery speed and achieve faster delivery timeframes (like same-day delivery)
  • Reduce cart abandonment: Free shipping (and shorter shipping timeframes) can have a big impact on reducing cart abandonment. Using the ship from store model can help you to more easily meet these timeframes.
  • Reduce the impact of warehouse issues: With your retail stores able to service online orders, any problems with your main warehouse become far less of a concern. For example, if you need to temporarily close the warehouse.

How to get started with ship from store

If you decide to ship from store, you’ll have a few decisions to make, including how to structure your order routing, point of sale, delivery and post-purchase communications.

Note: Every ship from store strategy will be different based on your business needs, so it's important to understand the different options available to you. In this section, we’ll broadly cover the key parts of a ship from store strategy that you’ll need to consider.

Order routing

Order routing is the process of determining the most efficient and cost-effective way to fulfill an online order by selecting a specific retail store as the fulfilment location. Most retailers will have a criteria matrix that prioritises one location over another. These criteria could include factors like:

  • Which stores have stock?
  • Lowest cost delivery
  • Can the location fulfil the entire order?
  • Prioritise stores with higher stock levels

How you route orders will depend on factors like which platforms you’re currently using, whether that’s your OMS or a dedicated solution.

If you’re just using DHL Express Commerce to handle order routing, you’re limited by the conditions the DHL Express Commerce rules engine includes (like destination post code). You’ll need an OMS or other platform to route based on the conditions we’ve outlined above.

Delivery options

You can offer many different shipping options to your customers, including standard, express, same-day and more.

This is important, as customers are increasingly demanding more choice when it comes to shipping, and faster delivery timeframes. In fact, one report from McKinsey shows that over 90% of US online customers expect free shipping within a couple of days.

Many carriers now offer on-demand shipping, enabling customers to receive their orders well within the same day they place an order.

Point of sale

Businesses must carefully choose POS systems that facilitate quick and reliable transactions. Just as customers expect prompt online order fulfillment, they also anticipate swift and seamless experiences at physical points of sale, emphasising the importance of choosing POS systems that align with evolving consumer preferences.

You may want to use your existing POS for your store staff to fulfil from, or DHL Express Commerce – more on this to below.

Point of sale systems include:

  • Shopify POS
  • Retail Express
  • Microsoft Nav vison
  • Lightspeed
  • Square

Ship from store example

DHL Express Commerce serves as the smart, automated link between your online store and physical stores, other integrated solutions and your carriers.

Customers place their orders online through your eCommerce platform, at which point (depending on your set up), these orders get allocated to one of your retail stores.

How orders get allocated depends on what system you’re using, as sometimes allocation can happen at the checkout before an order is placed (So you can display same day delivery options, for example).

Then once the order is placed, the fulfilment location is communicated to DHL Express Commerce and routed to the correct child account - how this is done differs depending on set up.

In store, staff simply need to access the user-friendly DHL Express Commerce dashboard on a computer, where they can print multiple orders (even using different couriers) with a few clicks. Then, DHL Express Commerce passes the relevant information across to your couriers and updates the source system with tracking data and order status.

From a warehouse or head office perspective, you can use the search from your master account, enter an order number, and see which store has been assigned to fulfil it.

This makes it easy for your centralised customer service teams to answer incoming customer queries, such as “where's my order”. DHL Express Commerce can assign orders to store accounts using rules (based on postcode, for example).

Child accounts

Child accounts are attached to your parent DHL Express Commerce account. Your child account generally has different settings from your parent DHL Express Commerce account, e.g. different settings, integrations, pickup address and more.

There are different types of child accounts:

  • Multi-location: Use this when you are shipping from two or more physical locations. For multi-location child accounts, branding and integrations are inherited from your parent account.
  • Full access: Use a full access child account if you want different settings for each store

Note: You can adjust carrier settings, print settings and sender addresses for each child account.

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