Leading Specialty Retailer Brings Choice to Their Customers

body care products on a small bathroom table

This popular body care and home fragrance retailer founded in the early 90s, made it their mission to brighten the world through the power of aromatics. With more than 1,500 stores across North America, this specialty retailer aims to improve their communities and the planet with their products.

Challenge

Since joining the Radial family in 2005, the retailer has continually evolved to satisfy consumer demands. They quickly realized that eCommerce was becoming a preferred shopping channel and would therefore bring on new and complex customer expectations. Throughout the years, brick-and-mortar and eCommerce have evolved to provide customers with multiple buying and delivery options. As such, Radial and their client needed to explore opportunities to stay competitive.

Solution

After extensive research, the retailer learned they needed a hybrid omnichannel solution that leveraged in-store inventory while also expanding their distribution footprint through permanent and temporary (pop-up) nodes. Piloting with 40 stores, Radial and their client launched Buy Online Pickup In-Store (BOPIS) and later implemented Buy Online Return In-Store (BORIS), offering their customers delivery options driven by convenience. Both solutions were enabled by Radial Order Management (ROM), giving them clear visibility into their inventory and feature-rich reporting tools. Additionally, Radial established pop-op fulfillment locations to accommodate increased order demand for peak and seasonal promotion periods. These pop-up sites allowed Radial to handle order spikes while cutting down on transit times during critical peak months.

Outcome

After going live with BOPIS on a 40-store beta program, the retailer and Radial have enabled 1,000+ stores nationwide and 1500+ stores with BORIS. They are expanding their omnichannel arsenal with plans to launch Store Fulfillment via Ship from Store (SFS), piloting a handful of stores in 2022. Radial’s client achieved great success with Radial’s pop-up solutions while maintaining their permanent residence in Kentucky. In addition, Radial launched another permanent distribution center in Atlanta in 2021. Radial and its client will partner to continue exploring new opportunities, ideas and technologies to build even better fulfillment and omnichannel solutions.

Results

Radial’s client achieved great success with Radial’s pop-up solutions.

  • 2,500
    Approximate SKU Count
  • 5
    Historical Pop-Up Locations
  • 1,000+
    BOPIS-Enabled Stores
  • 1500+
    BORIS-Enabled Stores

Payments

The popular specialty brand has a wide reach throughout the US with customers spanning coast to coast. As eCommerce has become the preferred way of shopping and as payment methods continue to evolve, finding a way to accept more payment methods while ensuring accurate data capture to accommodate higher order volumes was paramount.

Combining machine learning and industry expertise, the retailer’s growth has exploded with the expansion of Radial Payments capabilities, providing the bandwidth to accept everything from Visa and Mastercard to PayPal and Apply Pay, with plans to expand. In addition, Radial protects their client’s bottom line through vigorous payments check processes put in place to catch credit card errors before the order is placed, producing quicker throughput and impressive authorization rates.

Tax

Lastly, the retailer needed to implement an effective solution to ensure proper taxes were being collected at checkout. Tax collection can be difficult if the right rules aren’t in place as orders are shipped across the US. To prevent undercharging tax and risking their bottom line, and to protect their customer experience by not overcharging shoppers, they completed their portfolio by implementing Radial’s Tax solution. As their eCommerce business grew, the Radial Tax team worked with their client to implement proper tax rates and rules based on delivery locations, and this enabled a better customer experience while also avoiding any legal issues with states and other tax units.

Fraud

Fraudulent activity is another key issue that the retailer had to face with the rise of its e-commerce business. Resellers threatened the client’s approval ratings, bottom line and customer experience so they began using Radial’s Fraud Zero solution, which allowed the retailer to build a plan to prevent fraudulent purchases. Through machine learning and human intervention, Radial’s Fraud team created rules that identified commonly fraudulent purchases based on location and purchase history, protecting their client from increased chargebacks and manual reviews.

Since going live on Fraud Zero, the retailer has seen dramatic increases in their approval rates, allowing only verified orders through improving their overall customer experience. Additionally, they have seen decreased chargebacks as well as quick turnaround manual reviews.

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