Unleash omnichannel solutions with the best-in-class commerce platform
By: Rafael Campos
Tags: Ecommerce, Online Business, Digital Transformation, It, Omnichannel

#ecommerce #omnichannel #digitaltransformation #it

Welcome to the second part of this trilogy about omnichannel solutions. In the previous part, I presented the main IT challenges companies have all over the world:

Lack of delivery time and cost calculation: most of the ecommerce platforms don’t have the ability to calculate precisely how long it takes to ship goods to customers in different ranges of postcodes. They rely on tags, such as “Shipping-from-store: 4 business days”, which reflects the worst-case scenario, hence decreasing conversion rate. Limitations when managing multiple fulfilment locations: we explored the example of a company with 40 physical stores across the UK and the importance of storing, calculating and displaying the stock availability of each of these locations according to the selected delivery (or pick-up) method. Manual procedures: without having automated processes and integration between systems, I presented two real cases of companies having their staff acting manually, order-by-order, to allocate them accordingly. Besides increasing operational costs, manual work limits growth. Integration with external OMS, the leap to a new problem: I showed why integrating an external Order Management System might affect the latency and SLA and drastically increase operational costs. Although it’s a common practice, the implementation process is certainly a challenge.

If you haven’t read the first part yet, feel free to do so by clicking on the link below.

Throughout this second part, I’ll explore more about VTEX’s omnichannel solutions, such as OMS, marketplace tools and how companies are unleashing all capabilities by using our native features. First and foremost, however, I want to share a couple of highlights Gartner wrote about VTEX in their last Digital Commerce Magic Quadrant Report:

Marketplace and fulfilment providers: two different abstractions

When was the last time you placed an order on amazon.com? Do you remember how many sellers did you buy from? Do you remember receiving different emails saying that your parcel was shipped, even though you placed one single order?

VTEX works the same way. In our architecture, each fulfilment entity is treated separately from the store, the marketplace entity, thus making it possible to onboard physical stores, 3PL, warehouses, dropshipping providers or even external sellers. That means it’s possible to implement any omnichannel strategy such as ship-from-store, click-and-collect, drive-thru collect and others only through configuring the platform. No wonder Gartner points out our marketplace capabilities as one of our main advantages.

The screen below shows VTEX back-office and an example where a company has multiple stores, a 3PL provider and one main warehouse fully integrated.

Each of these locations has an environment where it is possible to set its strategies individually. Everything from the catalogue, price, inventory management and promotions can be managed separately by each location.

As you can see in London’s and Manchester’s store panels, prices vary. Therefore, when a customer is accessing the store from Manchester, VTEX not only applies the prices accordingly but also displays the products available in that region.

Note: as an API-first solution, prices, inventory management, promotions and a lot more can be fully integrated using our Rest APIs.

Omnichannel cart and checkout: simplifying the UX

Besides being a headless solution, VTEX offers two important modules which help our customers to be more agile: VTEX CMS and Store Framework. Instead of building the checkout UI from scratch, which might take months depending on the complexity of the operation, VTEX offers a set of native out-of-the-box front-end components that solves omnichannel scenarios.

Below you can see an example of the native components that allow customers to select between home delivery or click-and-collect.

Now, let’s imagine the scenario where a customer has added two items to the basket and selected click-and-collect. As I said previously, due to the fact that VTEX controls the stock availability and the shipping policies of each location, the system knows that one item is available for collection at the selected store, King’s Cross, while the other is not.