Fulfillment for the fashion industry - challenges and opportunities

For several years, the fashion assortment has been ranked first among the most frequently purchased product categories on the Internet. According to the data of the report "E-commerce in Poland 2021", as many as 72% of Internet users indicated clothing and accessories as the most frequently purchased products online.

E-business based on the fashion industry - how to approach it?

E-commerce based on fashion products is quite a demanding business, as it is challenging to successfully sell at a distance products that cannot be touched or tried on. One way to win customers is to handle the logistics of orders flawlessly and efficiently, and in both directions. The ability to quickly deliver several different garments or pairs of shoes, combined with the ability to quickly and easily return those that don't like or fit, is both a way of building trust among customers and a method of building a competitive advantage in the market.

What should an e-commerce warehouse look like?

An e-commerce warehouse handling this type of shipment must meet a number of requirements to guarantee efficient logistics operations for e-commerce processes. It is difficult to perform these tasks effectively without an efficient WMS (Warehouse Management System). It is not only responsible for storing information on thousands of products, but is also sufficiently capacious that hundreds or thousands of new items can be added each season. Each colour and size of garment is a separate stock index, moreover, their life cycle is quite short (1-2 seasons) and new items arrive every now and then, but the history of those that have sold out must be stored, if only for the purpose of handling complaints.

Returns handling process using the warehouse system

The warehouse system must also support the returns process. Vendors, anxious to convince as many buyers as possible, are extending the withdrawal period well beyond the statutory 14 days. Today, the 30- or 60-day return period is no exception, but there are also retailers who allow up to 100 days after purchase. This means that a warehouse handling logistical sales of seasonal products with a short life cycle, such as clothing and footwear, must have the tools to identify order returns even a quarter back and be able to correctly recognise and accept the return of a product that has long since gone out of stock.

Implementing a WMS seems to be a necessity in such a situation. However, for smaller and medium-sized entities, the costs may prove to be an insurmountable barrier to entry. In such a situation, it is worth considering placing the operation in the hands of professionals, i.e. companies providing fulfilment services, which, like InPost Fulfillment, in addition to professional and modern warehouses, also have state-of-the-art WMS systems, fully supporting the processes described above.

Another peculiarity of the fashion industry is that returns are often free of charge as an additional incentive for risk-free shopping. A warehouse carrying out e-commerce fulfilment should be able to, among other things, generate return labels (not every customer has a printer) or the retailer should provide a maximum easy-to-use method of sending return parcels, such as the label-free returns service offered by InPost: https://szybkiezwroty.pl/pl

E-commerce shopping and ecology - how to reconcile the two?

Increasingly, consumers are taking ecological aspects into account when making e-commerce purchases and here, too, it is worth offering buyers modern and environmentally friendly solutions. Delivery by Paczkomat® InPost alone reduces CO2 emissions by over 70%. It is impossible not to mention the pioneering project undertaken by InPost and the Modivo brand, which was the first to introduce reusable dispatch packaging, a phenomenon not only for this industry, but also a new solution on the scale of the entire Polish e-commerce.

A modern and responsive fulfilment warehouse should offer a range of different services and products that take into account current eco-trends. InPost Fulfillment, as part of its e-commerce logistics services, not only offers the possibility of using reusable EkoBox packaging for shipments via InPost's Paczkomat® parcel machine, but also provides access to, for example, eco-foilpacks, made from recycled materials and bearing the Blue Angel 30a/34280 certificate.

Product storage requirements

Another distinguishing aspect of e-commerce logistics for the fashion industry is the range of product storage requirements. In the case of footwear in cartons, the challenge is rather marginal, requiring only that the height of the shelves be adjusted for convenient product picking in the picking process. By contrast, the typical 'clothing' can already have very different requirements. Products such as jackets, coats and blazers very often require hanging storage on dedicated hangers. A fulfilment warehouse should provide both the technical possibility of such storage (various types of hangers with large capacity and easy access) and system support for this form of storage. In contrast, all small items and accessories require varied shelf sizes in order to optimise the space taken up - a storage space for 4 large jumpers will accommodate several different indexes of socks, and the storage system and shelf configuration must handle this.

Fulfillment service - what does it offer?

As part of the InPost Fulfillment service, the customer has the flexibility to adapt the forms of storage, depending on the requirements of the specific type of products. Whether it be hangers or smaller or larger shelves - no problem. What's more, the operator is also able to handle non-standard storage units such as pallets with cardboard boxes or self-supporting cartons with internal hangers.

Packing and shipping even demanding garments is also no problem. Elegant coats or jackets can be packed immediately, after taking them off the hanger, in dedicated cardboard boxes, minimising creasing of the clothes in transport. As part of the e-commerce logistics carried out by InPost, the customer can use both the packaging provided by the logistics operator and its own packaging.

Fulfillment services - summary

The above considerations indicate that the fashion industry is not an easy business to handle on the warehousing and logistics side. High expectations in terms of lead times, long periods for returns, free returns, or the very organisation of the process of storage, preparation for dispatch and packaging indicate that in many cases it is worth considering putting all these operations in the hands of professionals. Using logistics carried out comprehensively by InPost, the customer not only has access to a professionally prepared warehouse infrastructure, supported by modern systems, but can also, as part of the synergy, benefit from the optimisation of shipping costs available to those using InPost Fulfillment.