Omni-Channel success

Seamless digital stores

Retailers lost on average $260B (CNBC report) in returns in 2017, its estimated the majority of those returns were in clothing due to fit issues. Today there isn't a great way to try on clothes and still get the online expierience that clients are looking for.

However, that can change.

Cloud is opening the doors for retailers to change the way they manage inventory. Amazon the big online retailer isn't immune to this issue. Although Amazon doesn't publish how much inventory they have to write off as a loss (many times Amazon doesn't have you return an item because it would cost more to ship than the item is worth), however analysts estimate they have to write off about $437M a year in returned inventory.

Brick and Mortar companies could take advantage of cloud technology and reduce their return rates. How would this work?

Now I am not going to give away my full idea on revamping stores, this is a patent pending idea that I think will change the way clients shop, but here is a few teasers.

• Have sample sizes on the store floor, do not keep inventory in the store, but in a warehouse where real estate is less expensive and store the inventory and skus in a data center in the cloud.
• Clients can leverage the stores to try on the clothes, decide what fits and looks good together (lay the store out in outfit ideas instead of by item type)
• Place iPads near the dressing room with scanners after the client finds what they like they can scan all items, input their address and then drop ship the item to the client with the shipping carrier you have a partnership with.
• The clients can leverage this self serve to buy clothes they know fit and within a few days have those clothes in their homes, this would greatly reduce the amount of returns and client fustration, with laying out the store with outfits instead of items sales would also increase because clients are more tempted to buy something that looks good together. This includes putting accessories by the items.
• Your employees become more like fashion consultants than cashiers and you don't have to worry about a register coming up short every night.

Managing the inventory in the cloud would let you know what warehouse has the clothing, you can put sizes based on area in warehouses closer to your clients that wear those sizes and use your current data centers for credit card transactions. Store sizes could be smaller because you only need one of each size in the store for try on purposes thereby saving on real estate especially in the pricey cities such as Boston, Seattle, New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco.

Also this would give Amazon a run for their money as they could not provide this service.

Feel free to reach out to me if you want to discuss the technology that could be used to manage this.