Cue Clothing Company last week launched a new endless aisle solution that gives online shoppers access to its full inventory, including items that are no longer in the warehouse but still stocked in-store across Australia. The feature is the latest in a slew of new fulfilment and order options that the iconic fashion brand has rolled out over the last two years in its journey to gain a real-time view of inventory and customers across its e-commerce and bricks-and-mortar stores. Cue chief informa
tion officer Shane Lenton calls this approach “unified commerce”.
The new solution makes it possible for customers to order an item online and have it shipped from the store where it is located via a variety of fulfilment options, including store-to-door, where the item is shipped to their preferred address, or click-and-collect, where the item is sent to their nearest store for them to pick up. Cue’s shipping partner, Shippit, handles the logistics.
Previously, if an item was no longer in the warehouse, online shoppers were given the option to “find it in-store”. But if they weren’t within a 50km radius of a store that had the item in stock, they were not able to order it online. Some customers worked around this by calling the store to order it over the phone and have it delivered, but this was clunky and resulted in lost sales more often than not.
According to Lenton, the new solution has increased customers’ overall access to inventory eightfold, leading to a 70 per cent increase in conversions and 130 per cent increase in sales in the first week since launch.
“Since the launch of our endless aisle last Thursday, we’ve not only changed the way consumers can access our inventory, but we’re able to reduce the time it takes to deliver customer orders, and we’ve noticed a drastic reduction in fulfilment costs,” Lenton said in a media statement.
Global growth
However, this is just one aspect of the new solution, which has also opened up Cue’s entire inventory to customers in 120 international markets. The fashion retailer has been engaging in cross-border e-commerce through Pitney Bowes’ Borderfree solution for the past 18 months, but previously those customers only had access to Cue’s online offering. Now, they also have access to its in-store stock.
“We curate [our offering] to each location, particularly for international customers,” Lenton told IRW.
“But as much as our data tells us our curation is right for a certain location, everyone is different, and whether it’s to do with sizing, or particular products, we don’t want to keep it to one channel. We want to push everything out.”
International will be the next area of focus for Cue, according to Lenton.
“Now that we’ve built the foundations and got that fulfilment piece working really well, it’s going to enable us to really capitalise on the opportunity [in other markets].”
