How Shippit is helping Baby Bunting deliver
Allison Kraemer, Baby Bunting’s International Logistics & Fulfilment Manager for ANZ sat down with Power Retail to share how Shippit is helping Baby Bunting overcome challenges and achieve goals.
Baby Bunting, like many retailers in 2024, is facing the impacts of macro economic pressure in its category across pureplay and omni-channel retailers as it tries to keep up with cost increases and evolving customer expectations. With the help of Australia’s leading commerce delivery platform, Shippit, Baby Bunting has been able to activate 100 percent of its stores for online fulfilment, with the majority of Australian stores enabled for online fulfilment in just three months, helping it improve the customer experience and cater to the needs of its customer base.
The challenges: how to best use its stores for online fulfilment, improve net delivery recovery due to carrier increases, and improve customer experience by reducing split deliveries. With a widespread location of customers across Australia and New Zealand, regional and remote deliveries make up 40-45 percent of Baby Bunting’s online orders and the final mile costs are increasing.
“We wanted to publish more inventory online and also sell more clearance lines noting that our products are spread across our large network of stores. With rising carrier costs, we were looking at how we could fulfil orders closer to our customers and deliver a standard order even quicker,” says Allison Kraemer, International Logistics & Fulfilment Manager ANZ.
“We wanted to delight our customers and exceed their expectations, with a minimal increase in costs. We were seeing that our customers continued to shop with us, with a steady growth in our loyalty members, however the cart size was not growing at the same rate.”
“We have invested in offering free delivery thresholds as this is expected by our customers as well as something that keeps us relevant in the competitive landscape. We are also expanding on delivery options for customers by introducing a priority delivery metro service which will be available to customers in FY25.”
Enter Shippit, Australia’s leading commerce delivery platform.
“For our expansion into offering a priority delivery option, we were able to lean on the integration that Shippit has built with existing carriers, which saves us time and development costs by not having to build a bespoke solution for this,” says Allison.
“We found it easy to expand online fulfilment across our stores with the scalability and agility of the Shippit platform. We have the ability to tap into Shippit’s 100+ carrier integrations as well as the ability to rely on the existing Shippit CX delivery notifications, including offering Apple Wallet Order Tracking and real time delivery updates. This has meant that we didn’t have to develop these integrations and functions ourselves.”
Shippit Insights is helping empower Baby Bunting to make data-driven decisions with the ability to access data and insights on a whim, saving time and allowing the company to make decisions across the supply chain, digital, finance, and CX functions much faster.
“Shippit Insights is user-friendly and makes significant amounts of data available for any review of how a carrier is performing, our gross delivery costs, data to analyse weights, and distribution patterns of our deliveries. When analysing the data, we have been able to use the rules engine in Shippit to identify improvements and make changes accordingly. We consistently look at how to optimise our fulfilment network and the insights available from Shippit are valuable when we are analysing our activity across our network,” says Allison.
It’s not just the domestic business that has benefited from Shippit’s tools. Over in New Zealand, Baby Bunting has four stores and an online store. Baby Bunting is able to fulfil orders from all four NZ stores and a 3PL in Auckland that services the whole country in a quick and cost-effective manner.
“Shippit is providing the platform for us to easily roll out new faster delivery options,” says Allison. “We have been able to set up our BYO carrier accounts relatively easily with the existing integrations Shippit has developed, and we have been able to flex volume between various providers and see some cost savings coming through.”
“Our freight profile is quite diverse and we have the ability to work with Shippit in AU and NZ as they integrate new carrier partners into the platform, which is helpful as we engage different carriers.”
“Our fulfilment locations make use of Shippit and we adopt the practice of selecting the most cost effective carrier for the order; the algorithms in the logic will display the choice of carriers and we select the most economical for the lane and weights of the order. This makes it easy and straightforward to stand up additional fulfilment locations as well as making it easy for our team members to apply.”
As Baby Bunting continues to support new and expecting parents across Australia and New Zealand, what’s next for the company in their journey?
“We will continue to invest in online and enhance our CX from browse through to delivery, and we want to make sure we are able to meet the demands from our customers in terms of range and product innovation” Allison told Power Retail.
“We are looking at making more products available online by publishing inventory from all our stores, and fulfilment from all of our stores has enabled us to do this. This helps us move slow moving and seasonal lines and allows more space for exciting new ranges and expansion in core categories. We are also looking at faster delivery options and hope to launch an exciting new delivery offering in FY25.”
Article originally published on powerretail.com.au.
