As retailers continue to sift through year-end holiday results, what worked and what didn’t, it’s clear that part of the season’s success online lies in what they did to get ready on the back end. A snapshot of holiday preparations from an executive survey by Jupiter Media Metrix shows that many retailers made big changes across channels to prepare for what is traditionally their biggest season.
Almost of third of retailers polled--32%--said that by the start of the season, they already had hired or planned to hire more call center reps for the season than they had last year, while 23% had hired or were about to hire more fulfillment center staff than the last holiday. A full 19% had already implemented new systems for order management, demand forecasting and supply chain management; 16% had increased the physical size of their distribution centers, while 16% had brought fulfillment operations in house since the previous year.
Further, 10% had revamped their returns handling process and 7% had outsourced fulfillment for the first time while another 7% had changed third-party fulfillment partners in the last year. And though 10% said they had revamped their internal returns handling process since the previous year, none of those surveyed-–a sample of 31 retail executives--said they had carved out returns processing as a discrete function and outsourced it since the previous year.
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