The appearance of聽fitting rooms in Waitrose shows how retailers聽are reacting聽to changes in the聽eCommerce landscape, says聽tech entrepreneur聽Ed Bradley.
Bradley is the co-founder of digital supply chain Virtualstock, which聽uses聽cloud-based technology to聽create a seamless experience聽for its clients’ customers.
Six of the top 10 UK retailers are among those clients, including Tesco, John Lewis and Argos.聽Bradley (pictured below)聽says a new generation of Click and Collect services聽means the modern-day customer is more demanding and fickle than ever.
鈥淲e鈥檙e seeing changing rooms appearing in Waitrose because you can Click and Collect clothing supplied by John Lewis to the store, so it makes sense to try it on and return it where you are at that point,鈥� he told 老九品茶Cloud.
鈥淲e also see services where carriers will wait outside people鈥檚 doors while they try their jeans on and, if they don鈥檛 fit, they can return them directly there.
鈥淚t鈥檚 all about the ease of customer experience, that鈥檚 what鈥檚 really driving all this at the moment. Customers are so fickle and demanding now that the retailer has to react to that.鈥�
Bradley believes this is just one of several trends picking up pace in the retail space. He highlights drop shipping – where聽retailers do not keep goods in stock but instead transfer聽customer orders to聽the manufacturer, another retailer or聽wholesaler, which then send the product out directly聽– as one of these.
鈥淲e鈥檝e seen a lot of the strategies for large retailers looking to expand their range, which manifests in drop shipping,鈥� he said.
鈥淲e鈥檙e also seeing a move for retailers become marketplaces. Other brands can sell products directly to their consumers through their platform but they don鈥檛 become the principle in the transaction.
鈥淭hen there鈥檚 Click and Collect on the back of that. In some categories we see as high as 95 per cent being collected in store.
鈥淭he methodology is becoming more widespread, particularly in consumer electronics, because people don鈥檛 want their iPad sitting on their doorstep while they鈥檙e at work so they often pick up from store.鈥�
Virtualstock, founded in 2007,聽helps ensure that stock is always accounted for and retailers can expand their range without physically holding more items.
Most retailers that specialise in one area can hold around 20,000 products in their warehouse. By using Virtualstock鈥檚 system to sell suppliers鈥� stock on their websites without holding the stock themselves can massively increase this figure.
鈥淲e enable traditional retailers to hold a full assortment of their core range of products and expand into other complementary categories as well,鈥� said Bradley.
鈥淔or example, if you鈥檙e a DIY seller you might be expected to have every type of stepladder and garden shed and lawnmower so we enable huge ranges of those types of products to be featured online but then you might also want to go into products like DIY books and consumer electronics and IT products.鈥�
The platform, which has recently expanded into the NHS to help it make savings of up to 拢1bn a year, pulls in all of the product data to the retailers site then converts it all to the specifications of the retailer.
It then takes the inventory feeds from suppliers and updates it rapidly so any changes with the supplier are reflected on the retailer website.
鈥淵ou go to check out and the drop ship product comes into our platform,鈥� said Bradley.
鈥淲e place the purchase order with the supplier and when they dispatch it we track and trace it right up to when you sign for it at your door.鈥�