The Challenge of Fulfillment
P.J. Jakovljevic - August 14, 2006

Introduction

Genuine, integrated multichannel retailing will inevitably become the norm, so that if a customer does not see the desired appliance model (for example) on the shelves, the next step will simply be to use an in-store Internet kiosk to order it from the store's web site. And at the store's customer service desk, it will be possible to return items bought online as easily as if the customer had bought them off the shelves. In an evolution from the early Internet (where online retailer ["e-tailer"] pioneers were manually processing online orders, with many consequent fulfillment glitches), fulfillment methods of today are based on a new generation of technology solutions, although these may leverage some of the ideas of traditional mail catalog order fulfillment...