Ship from Store implementation helped Smyths Toys boost their sales in the pandemic

The impact of Covid-19 pandemic on the retail industry is well-known across the world. The retailers of different sectors faced their own challenges during this pandemic. The lockdown measures taken to prevent the spread of Covid-19 have had a profound impact on the customer behavior. This reflected in humongous E-commerce usage across the globe, as it is the safest way to shop and the only channel for buying non-essential goods. Furthermore, the supply chain crisis during the pandemic impacted heavily on the industries expecting their shipments from the far east.

The brilliant minds of Smyths Toys, who doesn’t want to disappoint their customers and to ease the stress on their central fulfillment hubs, put forth a challenge to Atlas team to implement a new solution. The Ship-From-Store (SFS) solution is designed to meet the increasing demand using the existing store network without stressing the web fulfillment centers. This would also be a critical sales channel for the business especially during the peak trading periods with national capacity demands on carriers and staff. In addition, this solution could also be scaled-up to enable more environmental same-day delivery capabilities for the business.

As always, time was against us to implement the solution swiftly and accurately, as everything in the world turned quickly. We were assigned the target to implement the solution within two months. In addition, there were many internal and business challenges to make this solution effective. Furthermore, that was the time the world started experimenting with the remote working culture.

For team Atlas, the greatest challenge was in terms of training the store staff to use the new process as we didn’t have the luxury of travelling and conducting training sessions. Hence, we decided to make the User Interfaces more intuitive, enabling anyone to start fulfilling the orders with a very minimal introduction.

Results:

The solution was successfully implemented in the UK and Ireland during the pandemic with a peak volume of over a half a million orders in the fourth month since the implementation. Total volume of about 2.7 Million SFS orders were fulfilled across the UK, Ireland and Central Europe through successful integrations with 8 carrier agents. The SFS solution helped Smyths Toys in achieving the same-day delivery capabilities across the UK and Ireland. The SFS solution is also tailored and used in one of Smyths Toys web-fulfillment center during the peak trading seasons to further reduce the workload on the central fulfillment hubs.