Black Friday, Cyber Monday (BFCM) weekend sales are expected to hit almost £10 billion, kickstarting a festive season of crucial retail sales. Stuart Greenfield, European sales director at Advanced Supply Chain, looks at how retailers can prepare supply chains for sales spikes
Black Friday sales boost
Britain’s biggest building society, the Nationwide, is predicting more than 12 million transactions will be made on the first day of the Black Friday sales weekend. This would mark a 10% increase on 2024 and could see consumers snapping up bargains across popular categories including electronics, fashion, health and beauty, homeware, food and drink, and toys.
Forecasts from VoucherCodes support a boost in Black Friday, Cyber Monday (BFCM) sales. A survey of 2,000 nationally representative adults by the money-saving website, estimates UK consumers will spend up to a total of £9.52billion across this year’s BFCM weekend, representing a 4.2% year-on-year uplift in sales.
Such figures are promising for retailers, but amidst such optimism and opportunity, there are often concerns about how supply chains will cope with heightened demand. Selling high volumes of goods at high speeds requires preparation in three supply-chain-critical hotspots.
1) Prioritise ‘retail ready’ stock
Preparation for peak sales will often prioritise stock inventory volumes and timings. Just In Time (JIT) systems will be put under the spotlight, as retailers concentrate on ensuring they have sufficient levels of stock, readily available to satisfy sales spikes. While this is an understandable starting point, it’s an approach that can fail to appreciate an underlying issue of stock readiness – a growing problem following trends of supply chain diversification and expansion.
Recent years have seen the spreading of risk in retail supply chains. Companies are expanding sourcing and diversifying product ranges to help mitigate supply shocks and boost sales. Unfortunately, this strategy can compromise the ‘retail readiness’ of products. SKUs are increasingly arriving at warehouses and fulfilment centres from different suppliers in varying formats. Product packaging and labelling often requires work to ensure consistency and compliance with retailers’ brands and systems to ensure goods are in a saleable format. Extra work can quickly cause supply chain bottlenecks, needlessly consume valuable staff time and lead to errors and problems with quality control.
The full impact of these types of issues is often underreported, because of manual processes during pre-retail stages of supply chains. Automating and digitalising labelling using mobile kiosks can help to enhance packaging and labelling compliance and streamline the speed-to-market of goods. Perfecting ‘retail ready’ stock can save crucial time that’s vital during peak.
2) Create end-to-end visibility
During peak season, reliable data and full supply chain visibility becomes even more important. Information can be used to create supply and demand models, as well as contingency plans, which better prepares stock inventory management for sales spikes.
End-to-end visibility, from sourcing to point of sale, and back again – don’t forget reverse logistics – can provide a control tower view of stock inventory. Data-driven decisions can be made to optimise warehousing and fulfilment processes, to identify and address errors, reduce wastage, enhance fleet scheduling and boost stock control efficiencies and effectiveness.
It’s often beneficial to audit the accuracy of supply chain data ahead of peak and to continue to test accuracy throughout the season, paying particular attention to communication across different sales channels to ensure all platforms are talking to one another. Retailers may want to question connectivity throughout supply chains to check whether key points of operation are creating and reporting data. Manual processes can cause a disconnect, leading to data inaccuracies.
3) Optimise quality control during returns
Peak is often a busy time for shoppers sending items back to retailers. Spikes in returns must be dealt with efficiently to reduce the returns void and to minimise the risks of returns fraud. Optimising quality control during returns is imperative.
The returns void refers to the lag between a customer sending an item back and when that item is available for recirculation, either via the original sales channel or another platform. Getting returned items quickly back in to the sales cycle becomes even more important during BFCM events, when there’s a limited – and competitive time – to engage shoppers. Deliberation during quality control can contribute days and weeks to the returns void and can be avoided by creating clearly defined salvage rates to enhance product inspections and restoration processes.
Returns fraud appears to be a growing problem – and one we’re working to address with our sister company ReBound. Not-for-profit fraud prevention service Cifas reported earlier this year that 35% of 16–24-year-olds admit they’d be willing to lie to get a refund. Such behaviour can include disingenuous returns, where dubious individuals will aim to defraud returns processes. We’ve seen examples of old shoes being sent back in place of expensive trainers, as well as ongoing issues of extreme wardrobing and other switched items.
Returns fraudsters know peak is a busy time for retailers and they will often aim to exploit this. Sophisticated software and robust product inspection processes can help to optimise quality control of returns. Inspections can be carried out quickly and effectively to combat fraud, while delivering the assurances required to confidently authorise genuine refunds in a timely manner.
To find out more about optimising supply chain hot spots for peak season, visit www.advancedsupplychain.com or email enquiries@advancedsupplychain.
