A last-mile distribution center can save you shipping costs, improve order fulfillment and transit time, and help your distributors balance inventory.

It’s a common misconception: A last-mile distribution centers is only for the biggest of retailers like Amazon, Walmart, and Home Depot. This simply isn’t the case. If your business does significant amounts of e-commerce, a distribution/sales center where customers can pick-up products could be the right move.

Cash really is king when it comes to cutting operational expenses like credit card processing fees. But, can a business really get more cash customers in this digital age? The answer is yes.

The growth of online shopping has caused retailers, rightly, to make real estate investments with an abundance of caution. But in Manhattan, the softening retail market is finding new friends in the pop-up-store concept.

Let’s examine this phenomenon and how it’s helped retailers looking to meet buyer demands for a physical location without a traditional real estate investment.

Having bilingual customer service representatives can help increase customer satisfaction and grow your business.

Have you underestimated the impact that customer service has on your organization? Customer service representatives can make or break how your customers feel about your business — especially if there are language barriers that make communication falter.

Sales are easy. Customer demands are not.

We all want life to be easy, but it rarely is. So a person, product or institution that makes it easy to get what we need or do what we want is memorable. We look forward to interacting with them again.

When it’s harder than it should be to get something we need or want, we’ll look for other ways to accomplish our goals. This is especially true for retail, where customers vote with their wallets. If one merchant makes it hard to get a product, or makes it difficult and expensive to return something, we’ll look for another one who won’t.

Soon customers won’t distinguish between shopping on their phones, online or in your store. Big data can help you prepare.

Americans are obsessed with smartphones. We use them morning, noon and night to manage our daily activities, follow the news, and stay in touch with friends and family. A new study by Asurion says we check them almost 80 times a day!

We also use mobile devices to shop. Mobile, or “m-commerce,” is growing 3x faster than traditional e-commerce, a phenomenon directly correlated to the explosive growth of smartphones. In 2017:

Here are 6 ways retail is using big data to keep operation costs low, increase customer satisfication, and increase profits.

When it comes to retail, the smallest gains can count the most. With such small margins, every bit helps to keep the bottom line in the black. This goes into keeping track of overhead as well as delivery costs. Now analysts are able to use data to keep operation costs low, increase customer satisfaction, and increase profits. So how are retailers using big data to bolster their sales and marketing efforts?

Package theft is particularly problematic around the holidays. But will that make consumers more open to delivery people entering their homes with Amazon Key?

Nearly 11 million U.S. homeowners had a delivered package stolen within the past year. This unfortunate side effect of the e-retail boom has many consumers searching for secure measures to keep their packages safe. Amazon, the company who is responsible for more e-retail than anyone else in this country, thinks they may have the solution in Amazon Key.

Consider customer geography, transportation infrastructure, the local talent pool, and cost when choosing a location for a last-mile distribution center.

Last-mile distribution centers can help retailers improve the most challenging and important aspect of delivery. These sales centers are not only convenient for customers, but they can be financially beneficial for businesses as well.

Retail is evolving.

Retail is changing so fast, it’s hard to keep up.

• Online merchants are going traditional and buying entire brick-and-mortar chains. (Amazon buys Whole Foods).
• Traditional retailers are buying same-day local delivery companies to compete with online merchants. (Walmart buys Parcel).
• Big-box retailers are encouraging customers to demo products without ever entering the store. (Ikea uses augmented reality to bring the showroom to your home.)

The one thing that never changes, however, is that the customer is always right.  Why? Because they always have the final say on whether to give their business to you or someone else.