This holiday readiness guide features three seasonal challenges you can start mitigating now, along with a few ways SPS can help.

Challenge 1: Getting your team ready

Your employees are the backbone of your business, and they’ll be handling a big portion of the holiday challenges as they arise. With talent shortages and turnover at a high point, it’s more important than ever to ensure your team has everything they need to meet seasonal expectations and do their jobs efficiently.

Equipping your team with the tools and training they’ll need to streamline order processes, optimize channels and analyze critical data is the first step toward a successful holiday season. Leveraging solutions that improve automation, item data and sell-through metrics can help your employees handle the uptick in holiday demand.

How we help you accelerate team readiness

SPS Commerce offers a range of solutions and product features to help your teams prepare as orders start to ramp up. These solutions can work alongside the systems you already use to help your business keep up with demand.

• Our Fulfillment solution can increase the efficiency of your entire order process by making it faster and easier to manage. You can fulfill and invoice multiple orders at once with batch order processing, set up defaults to reduce manual keystrokes with auto-sourcing, and streamline the process of acknowledging orders with quick-send and auto-send acknowledgement capabilities. These standard features can help employees stay on top of increasing order volume while boosting accuracy and speed.
• SPS Assortment ensures you can seamlessly provide and update item data for your customers, so your team receives orders with accurate product information that will reduce order processing delays.
• SPS Analytics delivers the sell-through data your team needs to make smart supply adjustments and use prior-year performance to predict trends for the upcoming holiday season.

Combined, SPS Commerce offers everything your employees need to stay ahead of the seasonal rush.

Challenge 2: Preparing your partners

Your partners are essential to your holiday success, so keep the lines of communication clear and consistent. When your trading partners can’t get accurate data about your orders, it can lead to delays, shortages and a compromised customer experience.

Ensuring your partners get accurate information is key, but it’s also essential to consider their systems and best practices. Talking with all your partners (including retailers, 3PLs, warehouses, etc.) to understand their equipment and onboarding processes can help you determine the best ways to stay connected during the holidays.

How we help you keep partners prepared

With best-in-class solutions that keep data flowing between thousands of businesses, SPS Commerce can help your organization improve how it communicates with its entire partner network.

• Fulfillment features reporting and visibility capabilities to help you monitor transactions and track documents sent and received by your trading partners so you can manage and avoid any issues that may arise.
• Assortment makes it easier to transmit accurate product information to your retailers and gives consumers accurate details about the products they’re ordering.
• Analytics data uncovers holiday insights to help you set the right expectations with your partners for product volume, mix and more.

SPS Commerce offers the solutions that make the transfer of data smoother between partners, so holiday planning and execution can continue without roadblocks.

Challenge 3: Creating a Plan B

Let’s imagine a wonderful outcome for the holiday buying season: Your product is wildly popular and flying off the shelves across every channel. Now the downside: Your retail partners need more product to satisfy the remaining demand, and your preferred carrier is having issues meeting shipping expectations.

It’s impossible to plan for all the emerging contingencies that could come up over the holidays, but having a general backup plan in case something unexpected happens can keep your business moving forward despite unseen setbacks. To start, think about some of the pain points around shipping and supply, and whether you have alternate partners or practices that you can rely on if a key element breaks down.

How we help you make a contingency plan

With products and services that give your business maximum flexibility and oversight, SPS Commerce can help you make a clear contingency plan for unexpected holiday challenges.

• Fulfillment’s actionable insights and workflow help you manage orders and understand which ones are ready to ship or invoice, so you can prioritize your time and create strategies to stop those problems before they start.
• Assortment delivers a way to share item data that can help you avoid errors and ensure your back-up plans are feasible.
• Analytics gives you a roadmap from prior years that can help you avoid pitfalls in supply and shipping while planning for what comes after the holidays.

By combining the capabilities of all the solutions from SPS Commerce, your business can stay ahead of holiday challenges. Together, our solutions form a purpose-built suite that can improve not only your holiday performance, but also your year-round efficiency.

A successful holiday season starts now. Contact SPS Commerce today.

Specifically, I’m talking about companies like Fastenal and Grainger, as well as NAPA and AutoZone. If you’re not in the trades, you’re probably not familiar with them. These are the “stores” (they’re actually called branches) the contractors and auto mechanics go to for tools and parts. Rather than going to the hardware store, a contractor can call a distributor to order the specific new hammer drill or sump pump needed for their worksite or job.

Fulfilling special order requests

In the past, anything that wasn’t in stock at the branch was processed as a special order, where the sales associate would look up the item in a paper catalog and fax or phone the supplier directly with the order. The supplier would ship and fulfill each order, and send individual invoices to the branch who relayed them onto corporate or the customer. This is the retail special order system.

Special orders have always been a particular pain point for distributors, but today many are streamlining this order process. SPS Commerce has been working with dozens of distributors to automate their ordering and inventory systems as a way to eliminate special orders and place them through the automated electronic trading process used with all orders. This allows each branch to place special orders, but everything runs through a centralized system. It’s streamlined and operates more efficiently, and its tracked and monitored for improved customer service.

Branch personnel still place and receive the order, but suppliers love it because now 60 – 80% of their orders are placed from a single source per distributor not the hundreds of branch offices, which means they improve the accuracy and timeliness of their shipments.

Lastly, distributors can easily measure the popularity of special order items to determine whether they should stock these products or sizes at the branch. If they see the same part or tool being frequently ordered at a site, the distributor can include the item in its inventory at the branch.

Ultimately, streamlining the retail special order system and regular orders into one process has been important to distributors, both for the cost reductions as well as the improved customer service. Now that the order cycle is automated, they have access to order status information and shipping details from advanced shipping notifications (ASNs). And they can confidently communicate these details to their customers.

Streamline the replenishment of the retail special order system

SPS Commerce can help maximize the efficiency of warehouses and distribution center by optimizing order management and warehouse throughput. This will remove warehouse bottlenecks by improving the way distributors work with suppliers.

If you’d like to learn how your business can automate its own ordering process and how we’ve helped distributors achieve success, please contact us today.

Thanks to Google, we can compare consumer demand data for the most popular eco-friendly products and services in the United States:

We can also identify the top U.S. cities whose populations are searching for eco-friendly products:

Search Trends for Kindles, Solar Panels and Electric Cars

According to our research, San Jose has the most eco-friendly shoppers in the U.S. On average, San Jose searches for eco-friendly products almost seven times more than the city in last place, Dallas.

Below we’ve taken an in-depth look at the three most popular eco-friendly products, Kindles, solar panels and electric cars, and highlighted the most and least interested cities.

The most popular eco-friendly product was an Amazon Kindle. San Jose has the highest interest in Kindles, according to Google searches. There are more benefits to e-readers than the reduction of paper pollution. Although, as San Jose also ranks highly for other eco-friendly products, they likely take the Kindle’s environmental impact into consideration prior to purchasing.

It goes without saying that some cities are at a distinct advantage for solar panels. El Paso has the highest demand for solar panels and the city also ranks as the sixth sunniest city in the U.S. (achieving up to 84% average annual sunshine).

However, Austin has up to 60% average annual sunshine yet still ranks as the fifth most interested in solar panels. And, Dallas has 61% average annual sunshine but ranks in the top five least interested in solar panels. Opportunity doesn’t always mean social obligation.

Not only is San Jose the top for consumer interest in electric cars, but it is also home to some of the biggest names in the electric car business. Notably, QuantumScape, a company that produces lithium batteries for electric cars whose investors include Bill Gates and Volkswagen.

Shoppers Seek Out Eco-Friendly Retailers and Suppliers

Studies have already shown that two-thirds of consumers consider sustainability prior to making a product purchase. While some regions may be slightly more conscious than others, there’s no question that eco-friendly products are on the minds of shoppers across the U.S. This is why if you are an eco-friendly retailer or supplier, it’s important to identify which cities are best to target for these products and make sure these shelves are always fully stocked.

Eco-friendly or all-natural products sell fast when discovered, just ask a few eco-friendly suppliers such as Nanoleaf and Nutricare that have partnered with SPS Commerce. With retail analytics software you can see trends from store level to a heatmap of the U.S. Allowing you more opportunities to capitalize on trends within your market.

Methodology

We used Google Keyword Planner to identify the most popular eco-friendly products and services of the past year. The regional feature identified the number of searches for the top 25 most populated cities in the U.S.

Searches were divided by the total number of searchers in each city to get searches per capita. This was then multiplied by 100,000 for searches per 100,000.

Each product was then averaged out to find an average number of searches per 100,000.

It didn’t take long before retailers realized they needed to jump on the e-commerce bandwagon. That has changed the larger retail landscape, as consumers use their laptops and mobile phones more and more often to buy from those retailers. This has led to the development of omnichannel strategy, where consumers expect their brick-and-mortar experience to match their online experience across their website, social media and more, which has forced retailers to make sure the online world and physical presence fit seamlessly together. In turn, retailer expectations of vendors has been raised as well.

Retailer expectations of suppliers

Now suppliers and vendors have been asked to up their own game to satisfy retailers’ and consumers’ expectations revolving around omnichannel experience. That means providing transparency into their inventory, streamlined communications through EDI, visibility for shipments, speed in all processes and working as a collaborative team player to make end-customers happy. It has also led to drop shipping from a suppliers’ distribution center directly to consumers or a retail store.

Regardless of channel and method, vendors and suppliers have more shipping and delivery options and expectations than ever before. E-commerce has also led to more features and technologies being provided to, and expected of, both suppliers and retailers.

For example, just a few short years ago, it was really only the big retailers who were asking for drop shipping from their suppliers. They didn’t want to ship cases into a warehouse only to ship out individual orders; they wanted their suppliers to manage that for them, and save those additional transportation costs. So they found a couple suppliers willing to take on drop shipping for them as part of their new e-commerce sales channel. That worked so well, now many retailers are asking each supplier to manage drop shipping inventory for them, and that number is only growing.

More services, more collaboration

It’s not just drop shipping, though. More and more retailers are relying on their vendors and suppliers to provide accurate and detailed item data on products. After all, the distributor has insights into their category that a retailer doesn’t have – but it also works in reverse, too, as retailers have data that the vendors might not have. The collaborative exchange of information between retailers and vendors can help both to sell more, make more customers happy and gain more success.

Such retailer and vendor partnerships and collaboration requires a considerable amount of trust. When vendors ship orders directly to customers, how well they perform is a direct reflection on the retailer who made the sale. Timeliness, accuracy and visibility are all incredibly important for making sure that the purchase is a good experience.

Proof is in the data

When vendors fulfill on retailer expectations and consumer expectations and have the numbers to back it up, they can win more business from buyer trading partners. When you have data that show you’re fulfilling your promises with a 99.8% on-time delivery, or 99.3% accuracy rate, retailers will want to work with you.

You can also make recommendations to retailers of what products they might consider carrying in their stores, based on the sales volume of certain products in specific regions, they may want to carry those products on their store shelves.

Now is the time to perfect your drop shipping services and build out your analytic tools to track to data so when the next negotiation rolls around, you’ll be armed with the data you need to help retailers reach their new goals. You may want to use your own internal analytics too, rather than relying on your retailers’ numbers, especially if you sell products to more than one retailer.

You may even want to roll in the postal codes you’re delivering to, in order to compare the vendor drop ship orders to their in-store sales to see which performs better. Many vendors don’t want to do drop shipping if the retail stores start doing their own fulfillment. They would rather manage bulk shipping, and leave the fulfillment to the retailers.

Of course, you won’t actually know how the numbers look until the holiday shopping season is over, but you need to be prepared to start collecting them. SPS Commerce can show you how with our point of sale analytics tools. We can help you narrow in on specific regions or even cities and zip codes, or help you compare retailers’ total sales. And we can even help you alert retailers to performance issues at the store level.

To learn more about how vendors can meet retailer expectations, please ask to speak with one of our staff to guide you through our system.

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In order to reach the consumer, both Callaway and PGA Tour Superstore had to collaborate to figure out what the consumer is looking for and also what makes the consumer happy.

“Engaging the customer and giving the customer an experience when they come into the store is extremely important,” Peitsch said. “Creating trust is a big part of what we have to do to be successful as a retailer.”

The successful collaboration between Callaway and PGA Tour Superstore has led to both companies working together in order to create compelling content for various social media platforms, such as Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.

“We’re constantly working together to make cooperative content and creative tools.” Arnett said.

With the evolution of the game of golf and the emergence of new-age golf superstars, such as Jordan Spieth, Jason Day and Rory Mcllroy, the need for compelling content is at an all-time high.

“Social media has really exploded with this new generation of players,” Peitsch said. “This is where the world is going now and our customer is so passionate about the game that they want to know what each player is using.”

Having the ability to create compelling content as well as the ability to really figure out what the needs, wants and desires each individual customer has are what have helped Callaway continue its reign as the leader in golf performance and innovation for more than 30 years as well as allow PGA Tour Superstore to set a plan to double the amount of brick and mortar stores across the United States.

For more information on SPS In:fluence events, check out the PAST SESSIONS page here. Make sure to join in with the conversation on Twitter by using the hashtag #SPSInfluence.