Love to Shop

Some of my favorite memories are of shopping. I love to shop for the everyday and the special occasion. I love to shop with my mom, my sister, my friends, my husband, my kids. I even love to shop for groceries!

How lucky that I ended up with a 15+ year career in retail and Ecommerce. Maybe that is no surprise given all the shopping I have done over the last three decades.

I started my retail career in store operations and a lot of the mystery of the shopping experience was suddenly revealed. It is kind of like looking behind the scenes at Disney World. A tremendous amount of work goes into every single detail to make the experience friendly, exciting, enticing and rewarding. While much time is spent on merchandise presentation, up-selling and spend per transaction, the real payoff comes in the form of customer loyalty.

As my career progressed into more of a systems and Ecommerce focus, I began to realize that all of the details become infinitely more important on line. Most importantly, customer loyalty makes or breaks your business. While online marketing efforts, direct mail communications, email blasts and banner ads, drive customers to your site, the real test is in the follow through.

For any online business, retail or manufacturing, your biggest opportunity is providing your customers with all the services they need 24/7 and making sure they are working. It is also equally important to ensure that your operations, systems, distribution and demand planning teams are tied in to the overall goals of your organization. Seems simple, but the failure to do so can cause the biggest service failures.

With the curtain pulled back, many of my future blogs will focus on tying in-store and online together and discussing back end solutions to make your front end function most effectively.

That's it for now,
Gotta go shop!