Fulfillment Routing for Higher Margins, Capacity Control, & Visibility

To sustain margins with a D2C model, retailers need to automate as many customer-facing and time-intensive processes as possible with DOM.  If you were previously focused on wholesale or are starting to grow D2C sales, you should consider the sheer volume of individual orders (and inventory pieces) you’ll be managing now vs the small number of large orders on the wholesale side. 

For example, in a wholesale model, shipping a single pallet with 100 items to a single retail store, collecting payment, and updating inventory to reflect the change is much less complex than selling 100 items directly to consumers. A D2C approach requires consolidating orders from all the different selling channels (branded sites, apps, marketplaces, stores), relaying allocated inventory back to all selling channels, determining the most profitable location to fulfill the orders, communicating order updates, checking for fraudulent orders, shipping items to 100 different addresses, and managing reverse logistics leaves more room for error and poor margins without automation.