Drop Ship Management

For direct retailers, drop-shipping is a "win-win-win". Customers can buy anything from any place at any time. Drop Shipping, and a good web front-end, enable this. [Example: shoebuy.com offers 400,000 shoes and accessories]. Retailers expand their merchandise selection and are more likely to keep customers. And vendors open up their sales channels, making it possible to sell through a "zillion" storefronts.

But behind the scenes, drop-shipping (or vendor-direct programs) requires a careful orchestration of items, data and money as what appears to the customer as a simple dot-com order goes through a complex dance behind the scenes. Having hiccups in your drop-ship program can be deadly:

• 57% of customers buy from a competitor when faced with an out-of-stock (source: the e-tailing group's "Online Inventory Impact Survey", May 2007).
• 83% of product pages and 75% of shopping carts have real time inventory status (Source: e-tailing group's "9th Annual Mystery Shopping Study", Nov 2006).

To simplify the process, and ensure a positive customer experience, retailers must work closely with their vendors to exchange orders, updates and payments.

Inovis Drop Ship Management helps retailers roll-out and operate a "vendor direct" program by managing the supplier community throughout the process. Partner managers can leverage an online platform to manage thousands of partners, assess partner readiness, test and certify partners to program rules and manage day-to-day exceptions and performance.

Inovis Drop-Ship Management is part of the Actionable Intelligence product line, a collection of on-demand software modules to manage shared business processes and partner performance. As an on-demand service, Drop-Ship Management monitors a carbon-copy of transaction data against business rules and provides a flexible workflow system to assess partner readiness, certify transactions and remediate poor performers. These modules are pre-integrated with Inovisworks, and integrate with any third-party value-added network or other data source.

Benefits

• Better data quality, with up to 90% improvement in transaction quality, enabling partners to deliver accurate and timely transactions from the start.
• Reduced staffing needs, with up to 50% savings to onboard a partner, with reduced need for project managers and IT staff.
• Faster partner certification, up to10x faster onboarding, accelerating time-to-market and sales by getting partners certified in weeks instead months.