Omni Fulfillment: Imagine the Possibilities with Microservices

Omnichannel fulfillment capabilities are a must-have for retailers, allowing them to improve conversion rates and enhance the consumer experience. These capabilities include providing accurate availability and delivery dates during the shopping journey and allowing the customers a high degree of visibility during every step of the fulfillment process. In this post, we explore several ways omni fulfillment can impact your bottom line.

A recent study conducted by Aberdeen Group shows that companies with robust omnichannel customer engagement typically retain 89% of their buyers, compared to 33% of businesses with a sub-par omnichannel customer experience.

Advanced omnichannel fulfillment capabilities improve conversion rates by enhancing the consumer experience. Today’s shopper demands better availability, an accurate delivery date, and the ability to track fulfillment and delivery. This requires the ability to instantly make and execute the right sourcing, allocation, and fulfillment decisions. And retailers must deliver these capabilities cost-effectively or risk eroding margins.

To meet this challenge cost-effectively, retailers need deep visibility into their distributed inventory and capacity. Modernizing omnichannel fulfillment technology presents a valuable opportunity to increase revenue and improve the customer experience while also driving efficiency and lowering costs.

Powering the Possibilities with Microservices

Microservices are modular and composable “services” that are independently developed, deployed, and managed. Microservices can be combined to create functionality that allows retailers to quickly deliver new features to meet customer demands and create greater efficiencies for better profitability. 

And they can work with your existing tech stack to quickly and efficiently add new capabilities. Retailers can transform legacy systems into modern cloud-native, scalable workhorses using microservices.

Nextuple Fulfillment Studio delivers key microservices capabilities via three Tuples, including:

1. The Promise Tuple - Inventory, Capacity, Promise Engine & Sourcing
2. The Orchestrate Tuple  - Order State Engine, Omni Order Store & Omni Control Center
3. The Fulfill Tuple - Digital Order Queue, Picking, Staging, Packing, Shipping & Dispense Microservices 

The Benefits of Building a Modern OMS

Using microservices to modernize legacy order management systems allows retailers to react to consumer trends quickly and provide market-leading fulfillment capabilities that improve conversions and increase customer loyalty.

Retailers with modern OMS can enjoy a range of benefits, including:

• Improved conversion rates - Showing a promise date across the buying funnel can have a significant impact on the consumer’s decision to purchase and can increase conversion by up to three percent at cart/checkout, two-to-three percent at the product detail page, and up to two percent at the product listing page. Similarly, prompting with urgency signals (e.g. order in the next two hours to get delivery by tomorrow; or low stock alerts) can enable a one-to-two percent increase in conversion.
• Increased customer value - Delivering an aggressive promise can lead to meaningful improvement in consumer lifecycle value.
• Reduced customer care contacts - Providing better visibility and the ability to track order progress online can lead to much lower rates of inbound requests to the contact center, potentially reducing WISMO (Where is my order?) contacts by five percent.
• Reduced shipping costs - Showing dynamic promise dates by considering available inventory, managing transport rates and schedules, and optimizing for split reduction can save shipping costs by up to three percent.
• Fulfillment KPIs - Improving visibility and performance can enable store fulfillment KPIs to drive improved fill rate and processing execution.

Leveling the Playing Field

Nextuple helps customer-centric retailers create and transform omnichannel fulfillment using a microservices architecture approach. By partnering with Nextuple, retailers can quickly modernize their OMS and provide a customer experience that leads to greater conversions and increases loyalty.

The Nextuple Fulfillment Studio enables retailers to quickly build and scale new fulfillment experiences to delight customers, create more omnichannel agility and accelerate time-to-value. Contact us to learn more and speak with a microservices expert.