When my cousin and I began our new endeavor of opening up a chain of retail-clothing stores, we delegated all tasks evenly. My cousin's job was to handle interior designing and store presentation as well as to take care of sales while my tasks were to handle all advertising, merchandise purchasing, and inventory distribution.
Throughout our experiences, the most frequent challenge of all was finding a solution to shipping our inventory out to our stores in a safe, orderly, and timely fashion. Allow me to further elaborate.
Chain stores must function as one unit. They send out advertisements which advertise new products and discounts all based on the assumption that the products will be available to put on the shelf or to sell at discount prices, while they are not available at all.
Chain store unity can only be reached when the warehouse uses a distribution service that is able to both package the inventory and ship it on time to any destination needed.
With this set-up, our stores would be powered with in sync functioning, all offering the same merchandise, sales, and discounts at the same time. However, this idea was much easier said than done.
What normally took place was that our warehouse distribution functioned on a supply and demand basis. As the supply for a particular item went up, the warehouse would ship more merchandise. We were never able to get enough distribution power to ship our inventory out to all stores together, and therefore our stores were never in sync with each other.
This lead to numerous accusations of false advertising because corporate would advertise a sale or discount on certain items, while stores would not be able to provide for them because of lack of inventory.
When we finally found a pick and pack service that was ready to answer our calling, our sales began to soar sky high because no store has gone without being serviced on time, and our stores are able to function as one.
Bella C. Fletcher is a business developer with over twenty five years of experience in distribution services. For more details regarding the benefits of using pick and pack services in order to create a strong and unified business, check out the Bergen Shippers website online. Bella is an SEO consultant working with SEO services company ClickResponse.
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