BY BEN AMES, SENIOR NEWS EDITOR
INDUSTRIAL PROPERTIES AND SITE SELECTION MARKETTRENDS
Retailers can save big on inventory and shipping costs by filling
e-commerce orders from brick-and-mortar stores. But the practice
also carries some serious risks—like alienating in-store shoppers.
IF YOU’VE SHOPPED IN A BRICK-AND-MORTARstore in recent months, you may have seen store employeesacting strangely. Instead of restocking shelves or helpingcustomers find goods, they’re on the floor picking inventory themselves, filling carts with items for e-commerceorders.
The trend is the latest way that exploding e-commercedemand has rocked the world of retail.
The advantages of filling online orders from store shelvesare clear—retailers can save money by offering curbsidepickup or same-day delivery to consumers who live nearby,instead of shipping those orders from distant warehouses.They also stand to realize major cost savings by serving bothstore and online customers from a single pool of inventory.
However, industry experts warn that there are drawbacks
to the practice as well. For one thing, there’s the potential
for traffic jams when consumers and employees all try to
pick from the same inventory at once. For another, there’s
the risk of alienating shoppers who may find themselves
competing with store employees for items that are in short
supply. And that’s to say nothing of the cost implications
of devoting expensive urban real estate to tasks usually
performed in warehouses in low-rent areas. Or the need to
retrain workers for specialized shipping operations.
All this goes to say that as appealing as shifting to a store-
based fulfillment model may sound, it’s not a decision to
be taken lightly. There’s more to it than simply having
employees pivot from placing shelf goods into shopping
carts to placing shelf goods into shipping cartons. In reality,
it’s a complex calculation that requires retailers to weigh
The downsides of
in-store fulfillment
