Effective Shopify Plus Omnichannel Strategies For Your Business

Businesses are constantly in search for a way out to enhance their customer’s shopping experience. The best way too do is to target different sales channels and this is when Omnichannel fulfilment can assist. If you are thinking how Shopify plus omnichannel fulfilment can assist you, then below discuss all the aspects related to it. Read on.

Omnichannel: Why It Is Important?

Check out the reasons how it makes essential for all eCommerce organizations to infuse this technology:

• Providing a unified shopping cart and checkout experience regardless of the channel.
• Enabling order routing and fulfilment from multiple warehouses and stores to optimize delivery timelines.
• Streamlining returns, refunds, and exchanges across online and physical retail locations.
• Empowering store associates with real-time inventory visibility and order management capabilities.

How To Leverage Shopify Plus’s Omnichannel Capabilities?

If you are wondering why you need a Shopify Plus designer, then take a look how they can help you with omnichannel capabilities. 

• Multi-location inventory management to sync stock levels across all channels in real-time
• Click-and-collect and buy-online-pickup-in-store (BOPIS) functionality
• POS system with back-office order management for a unified frontend
• APIs and webhooks for easy third-party and custom integration
• Advanced reports and analytics for omnichannel performance measurement
• Shopify Plus agency partnership enables enlisting experts for omnichannel design, development and support.

Merchants can utilize these capabilities by tailoring strategies like marketplace channel expansion, BOPIS augmentations, localized fulfilment centres, and automated order routing. A Shopify Plus developer is essential in engineering the technical integrations required.

Implement Centralized Inventory Management

Real-time centralized inventory is pivotal for any omnichannel approach. Shopify Plus gives control over centralized inventory pools with location-specific breakdowns. Merchants must feed all stock data into this centralized system from sources such as:

• Legacy ERP or warehouse management software
• Multiple POS locations
• Third-party marketplace listings
• Vendor/supplier order statuses

This calls for custom application development with inventory APIs. A Shopify Plus agency can help design integrations to synchronize data seamlessly in the background. This gives customers accuracy across all channels while enabling algorithms to optimize order routing and availability.

Expand Through Strategic Marketplace Integrations

Marketplaces offer access to large buyer pools, but managing listings and orders across them is complex. Shopify Plus makes this easier through native and custom marketplace integrations. Some strategies involve:

• Listing products consistently on platforms like Amazon, eBay, Walmart, etc.
• Mapping order and fulfilment workflows for centralized processing
• Configuring bulk inventory uploads to marketplaces from Shopify inventory
• Developing custom dashboard views for marketplace performance analytics
• Streamlining returns, refunds, and support through Shopify customer interactions

This allows for capturing a wider audience while maintaining control over critical order and fulfilment elements through the Shopify admin.

Deploy BOPIS Tactically

Shopify Plus enables this through features like:

• Configuring store locations as fulfilment points with inventory pools
• Managing customer orders placed online for store pickup
• Empowering store associates with real-time Pickup capabilities
• Triggering automated pickup email notifications
• Integrating store POS for enhanced order lookup and pickup completion

Merchants must identify strategic store locations, upgrade POS systems, train staff and promote BOPIS on product pages to see higher online conversion and foot traffic. Third-party Click and Collect apps also augment the functionality.

Route Orders Optimally with Data Science

Leveraging predictive algorithms for order routing across a network of warehouses, stores, vendors, and third parties is crucial for the fastest fulfilment timelines. Shopify Plus offers order APIs to build these complex routing rules considering factors like:

• Item availability at specific locations
• Customer and item locations for the shortest delivery time
• Warehouse/location capacities and load variations
• Vendor/supplier order lead times
• Priority customer segments
• Time, cost and carrier constraints

Merchants should develop machine learning models to continually optimize routing based on historical order data. Outsourcing such requirements to logistics technology partners also eases management.

Final Thoughts

Shopify Plus provides merchants with a powerful foundation to engineer scalable omnichannel operations. However, strategically leveraging its capabilities requires vision, expertise, integrations and continual experimentation. Partnering with a dedicated agency helps navigate this journey efficiently by handling Shopify Plus development, design, ongoing support and consultation requirements. Their Shopify Plus designer tools and experience accelerate time to market for innovations that elevate both customer experiences and business growth.