Why choose Cegid Retail’s Distributed Order management system for your unified commerce strategy?

The COVID-19 pandemic changed the game in retail. Customers expect a frictionless buying experience now more than ever. Demand for contactless shopping, home delivery, curbside pickup and click-and-collect has skyrocketed. In addition, consumers are increasingly rewarding brands that exhibit responsible buying behavior, maintain short distribution channels and offer local delivery methods that reduce a brand’s carbon footprint.

After suffering a direct hit from the pandemic, retailers that can successfully adjust to “Retail the New Way” will be well positioned to quickly win back market share, restore customer connections and rebuild their businesses. The landscape today encompasses phenomenal opportunities for specialty brands able to implement an efficient omnichannel strategy and meet shoppers’ expectations. By leveraging their locations strategically and embracing new fulfillment processes that take advantage of a retail distributed order management (DOM) solution, these retailers will have the key tools needed to win in this new retail environment.

What can a DOM platform do for you?

Streamlining your fulfillment process and aligning the buying journey with your customers’ evolving expectations are keys to success. With a robust distributed order management system in your corner, you’ll have the ability to view unified stock, enabling real-time inventory visibility across your brand’s entire network. This translates into increased in-store sales while retaining the flexibility to fulfill customers’ orders through other channels, if appropriate. In-store representatives can identify the most time- and cost-efficient inventory locations to fulfill orders, therefore better serving shoppers’ needs and increasing associates’ productivity. By blending inventory from every channel, Cegid Retail’s distributed order management solution also helps to accelerate the digitization of stores and creates closer alignment with your customers.

The platform gives your brand a way to provide new omnichannel services to meet emerging customer demands. You’ll be positioned to take advantage of features that can help transform your stores into Unified Commerce hubs with the capability to support multiple scenarios more efficiently — ship from store and order in-store among them. These services allow you to preserve the profitability of your existing physical footprint and leverage the power of your store network as you continue to expand your digital services. This further enables you to propel your omnichannel strategies forward and deliver a consistent customer experience across a growing number of channels.

Gain the benefits of Cegid Retail Distributed order management capabilities

Designed to build on the power of Cegid’s core platform, the Cegid Retail distributed order management solution delivers crucial visibility into the information your associates need to support the customer shopping journey in the new retail era. With easy access to a single, global customer database that’s always current, associates can efficiently provide VIP guests with a highly personalized, frictionless shopping experience. Offering data related to inventory, orders and customers – and featuring the ability to manage sales, exchanges and returns in the same order management platform – your associates will have the tools to nurture strong customer relationships and drive in-store traffic with the latest contactless buying options. Associates will be empowered to deliver the best buying journey in person while providing shoppers with the powerful convenience and services available through a robust omnichannel strategy.

The system displays aggregate real-time inventory data for products from any inventory source in your brand’s network, including warehouses, store locations and distribution centers. This results in a unified view of merchandise inventory with the added value of presenting insight into detailed geolocalized stock availability per store. Multiple variables — inventory location, delivery preferences, shipping costs and other factors — are then used to determine the optimal sourcing option and delivery modes for each order. Your brand can configure the DOM to reflect the nuances of your selling ceremonies as well as your individual retail networks per continent or even per country.

Order tracking — from initiation through delivery and invoicing — keeps your associates aware of the status of VIPs’ purchases and gives high-value customers transparency into their transactions. They’ll always know where their items are headed and when they’ll arrive. Even complex orders can be easily managed in Cegid’s DOM platform. For example, not only does the system provide recommendations for delivery modes based on costs as well as speed of delivery, your sales staff also has the option to split product fulfillment across multiple inventory locations to ensure customers’ orders are handled to their satisfaction. To eliminate last-minute surprises, associates can ask individual stores to confirm they can prepare and ship an order. You’re in-store teams — and your customers — can count on timely delivery of items with the right Distributed order management solution.

The technology behind Cegid Retail’s DOM solution seamlessly integrates with core Cegid Retail Order Management and POS suite data and functionalities. Time to deploy the system is minimal, thanks to the prebuilt integration and full compatibility with Cegid Retail Y2, and a full rollout of our SaaS solution can be completed in a matter of weeks, rather than months. Easy integrations with many popular third-party systems are also available. Together, the suite forms a powerful and cost-effective platform that can help your brand to retail the new way to drive revenue and grow sales.