Los Angeles, CA — For retailers interested in selling more online (show us one who isn’t!), SQQUID’s new Drop Ship feature delivers the flexibility to offer products online without having the inventory on hand or even having the products entered into their POS. Drop Ship enables retailers to stock store locations with popular items, while keeping less popular ones in warehouses to fulfill their online orders. Additionally, retailers can test a product’s selling potential by offering it online only and, if it proves popular, adding it to their in-stores inventory.
SQQUID’s Drop Ship combines ease of use and flexibility into one small feature that packs a big punch. Simply turn on Drop Ship option in your SQQUID setup and specify what SKUs should be treated as drop ship items.
Then specify which of your locations should be used as drop ship locations in your POS integration setup.
And SQQUID will take care of the rest. Any order items matching the drop ship SKUs will be automatically routed to the designated drop ship location in your POS. Additionally, Drop Ship can be combined with SQQUID’s Geo Routing to further optimize fulfillment process, lower shipping costs and cut delivery times to your customers. SQQUID will attempt to find the best fulfillment location for each item from an online order — first by matching item SKU to drop ship SKU list, then checking priority store location(s) for available inventory and finally, using Geo-routing to find the closest store location(s) that can fulfill the remaining items.
Use Cases
SQQUID’s Drop Ship feature can accommodate various use cases. A few common ones are:
Lower in-store inventory
Retailers with one or more warehouses in addition to retail locations can designate a warehouse as a drop ship location. The retail stores can stock common inventory (e.g. most popular shoe sizes) and keep “long-tail” items in the warehouse. Customers can order “long-tail” items online and SQQUID will automatically route those items to the warehouse POS for fulfillment.
Pre-sell incoming inventory
A retailer can set up a virtual store without inventory in the POS and designate it as a drop ship location. Incoming orders for drop ship SKUs will create negative inventory count in the virtual store and those numbers can be used to place orders with the manufacturers and, if possible, instructing the manufacturers to ship items directly to customers.
Test new items
A retailer can list new items online, without adding them to store inventories. Item SKUs can be marked as drop ship, routed to a virtual store in the POS and fulfilled from a warehouse or dedicated storage. If an item proves popular, it can be distributed to physical stores for sale.
Customer Feedback
Drop Ship is currently live and available to all SQQUID customers. Feedback from early adopters of this feature indicates that they already see significant benefits from using SQQUID’s Drop Ship in comparison to the previous workarounds that they have had to implement in order to handle the various use cases outlined above. Stay tuned as we gather more data and statistics; we will be bringing more details about the benefits of Drop Ship in the coming months.