For your retail business to thrive in today’s Amazon-driven marketplace, you know how important it is to continually tweak strategies for improving the customer experience. After all, happy customers are key to robust sales profits.

To attract new customers, whether it’s to your online store or to your physical store locations, you must nurture customer loyalty so that they will want to come back. That means it’s imperative that you deliver top-notch customer service.

One way to do that is to adopt a “ship from store” strategy, using store locations as “distribution centers” for shipping out inventory. Ship-from-store programs are working well for mega-retailers like Walmart and Target and, as an article in Practical Ecommerce points out, “the same ship-from-store practices that help massive billion-dollar retailers will also work well for mid-market sellers with relatively few physical stores.”

According to a report from Forrester Research, ship-from-store programs provide a strategic opportunity for retailers to “strip Amazon of its competitive advantage.”  By using store locations to fulfill online orders, retailers have seen increases in both online and in-store revenues and customers are happy to get orders fast, which is somewhat expected these days. In fact, a survey by Walker Sands Communications, found that free shipping or one-day shipping was “the best incentive a retailer could offer” its customers.

Most of all, you must have the goods in-store and deliver the goods on time. That means accurate counts of all inventory items, all the time. 

A ship-from-store program can attract customers and boost sales, but be sure your inventory management system is up to speed with the latest technology tools to handle all that business growth.

The best way to know is to consult with an inventory management service like Blue Chip.