What Matters Most to Your New Retail Customers? Real-Time Product Visibility!

In part one of What Matters Most to Your New Retail Customers?, the key message was making certain that your Retail Value Chain (RVC) has the requisite integration capabilities to allow your company to competitively show up at the right time and in the right way for the right omnichannel customers. Part two looks at two ways modern retailers can achieve real-time product visibility: Track and Trace and Shipment Condition.

Here is a recognizable situation of a retailer not showing up in the right way. A very busy shopper is planning an important milestone birthday party for their child. The hurried shopper finds the perfect online gift, and it’s in stock! After happily making the purchase using their loyalty points, an unsettling message is immediately sent to the shopper’s phone indicating that the item is not in stock. The slightly upset shopper immediately calls the store to remedy the issue; a helpful associate answers the call and checks the store’s inventory. At first, the system shows that inventory is available. However, the associate – now puzzled – cannot locate the item in any of the store locations and apologizes for the inconvenience. The shopper expresses frustration and politely hangs up. The persistent associate calls several stores and locates the item; unfortunately the disappointed shopper already purchased the item from a different store. Moral of the story? Locating products should never be a time-consuming and challenging game of “Where’s Waldo?”

Product visibility: what’s the hang up?

Delighting loyal customers requires immediate product visibility. It’s a known fact that today’s customers operate in the “now” economy, which means you must provide them with either the product or product status now. So, is your RVC delivering real-time product visibility for the “now” digital marketplace, or are you delivering something else that might be missing the mark?

Unfortunately, many retailers are delivering something else. According to a 2021 article in Mass Market Retailers, one of the most critical supply chain errors is: “The lack of product visibility, typically caused by old or absent technology, which leads to blind spots, creating weak links in the supply chain and unnecessary risk.”¹ This suggests that the current RVCs might be delivering as “good enough” product insights as they have in the past. However, “good enough” falls short in today’s “now” digital marketplace; Amazon established the visibility gold standard years ago. The Achilles heel that limits some retailer’s RVC visibility capabilities is that their systems often provide delayed and only periodic product updates. This is due to many factors, including current systems (e.g. supply chain, warehouse, order management and customized support systems, etc.) that were integrated using older, slower methods to serve yesterday’s less immediate “patient” economy instead of today’s immediate “now” economy.

How can retailers offer product transparency in real time?

For today’s now economy, real-time product visibility can be achieved in several ways. This blog focuses on two approaches: Track and Trace and Shipment Condition.

Track and trace

First, product “tracking and tracing” is a retailer’s ability to digitally track, in real time, the status of arriving shipments to any one of their many distribution locations or associated stock keeping locations (e.g. distribution centers, dark stores, back rooms, etc.). Track and trace is important, because it plays a major role in inventory management. With knowledge of all inbound products, retailers have a real-time accurate understanding of all inventory levels, as well as an immediate understanding of where the inventory is located. This visibility enables retailers to quickly identify exceptions, such as low inventory, for any channel (e.g. in-store purchase, store pickup, home delivery, etc.), and then locate and pull inventory from other locations or warn customers of possible shipment delays. By either providing products from different stocking locations or keeping customers informed, they are less likely to buy from competitors because the retailer is providing what matters most—product visibility versus saying “we can’t locate an available product.”

Shipment condition

Second, “shipment condition” is a retailer’s ability to gain immediate visibility status into the condition of shipments that are fragile (e.g. electronics, glass, etc.) or perishable (e.g. food).  For either of these two type of products, retailers need to know if there are delays (e.g. snow, rain, etc.) that could impact perishable products or if major accidents (e.g. shock, accidents, etc.) could impact fragile products. The importance of this visibility allows retailers to quickly update and adjust inventory levels if adverse events have taken place to avoid missing customer shipments or shipping damaged products to consumers, and instead locate existing products – from any location – to ship to waiting customers, or immediately alert customers of possible delays – which again matters to them.

So, if your current product visibility is only “good enough,” then consider moving it into the “now” digital economy. Immediate product visibility in real time powered by API/EAI and B2B/EDI capabilities, such as the SEEBURGER BIS Platform offers,  can help you gain competitive advantages ranging from quickly tracking inbound logistics to faster tracking of the condition of shipments and locating products spread across multiple stock-keeping geographic locations. Product visibility no longer needs to be a time-consuming and challenging game of “Where’s Waldo?”

Stay tuned for part 3 of this blog series, “What Matters Most to Your New Retail Customers? Products on the Shelves!”