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This is probably not interesting to anybody but me but it’s operations story time now!
Welcome to “How to Turn a Retail Bookstore into a High Volume Online Fulfillment Center”
Welcome to “How to Turn a Retail Bookstore into a High Volume Online Fulfillment Center”
First we cleared out space for orders that had one in stock book but were waiting on a special order. We had 3 tags in our email inbox to track where in the fulfillment process the order was. Here’s our shelf of in stock titles that were pulled + awaiting a s/o friend.
We quickly found out that it is way more complex - we now have ten tags in the inbox and a remote full time bookseller tagging + tracking where in the workflow an order is. She’s our mission control now. That’s helped ease the workload on in person staff greatly.
The remote bookseller filters orders into type, so the staff on the sales floor (now fulfillment only floor) can knock out one type of order at a time. For example, each morning we first pull in stock pick up books + get them ready for pick up.
Then we receive books that have arrived from the publisher. During normal business life we usually have about 5-10 special orders a day come in. Now more like 50-100 of the books coming in are special orders. We then match the special order books to their in stock friends.
Time it takes a s/o to come in depends on the publisher. Some are closed + we order from a wholesaler, others are open a few days a week. Their fulfillment centers are dealing w/higher than holiday season volume, too. It’s usually 3-5 business days for special orders to arrive.
Once all the book friends in an order are together, we ring them up + pack the order in one of our cute custom mailers from @ecoenclose. I ordered 1,000 mailers in January on a whim. They arrived and I was like “omg I ordered too many!”
Reader, I did not order too many.
Reader, I did not order too many.
We cleared off the front table where we usually display new releases. It’s our shipping station now. I liberated these nice chairs from my dads law office up the street. Here we weigh and print shipping labels, then off the packages go!
The good news is we’re still getting orders, and my team is getting even better at filling them. Your orders are employing a full time remote bookseller, a full time floor manager, an events assistant (we’re doing 20 online events in April alone!) and two part time booksellers.
AND we just got our paperwork finalized for a grant we got to expand equipment for online order fulfillment! The grant from @workcouncil is helping us an entire second shipping station set up: new scale, label printer, more mailers...
So THANK YOU!! you for ordering from us, for helping make our dream of surviving this disaster more of a reality. Going into brick and mortar retail I never expected to operate a fulfillment center. After a rocky start it’s been so cool to see my team step up and make it thrive.
@ABAbook @NAIBAbook @ShelfAwareness we did a show+tell about flipping our store all online. I’d love to get more granular and could write/talk more about our new processes. We’re also hosting 40 virtual events in the next 2 months. http://oldtownbooks.com"> http://oldtownbooks.com check us out!
