So, obviously, if you go to a brick-n-mortar store and buy something there, it counts as a sale for the store, with stores that don’t get enough sales often closing. But if I order something online from, say, Best Buy and pick it up in store, how is that tracked? Does it count as a sale for the store, even though I didn’t actually buy it there? If not, do companies use a separate metric (ie this store doesn’t get as many sales, but people still come in to pick up stuff, so we’ll keep it open)?
Retail guy here.
Everything is usually in a centralized database of orders that are tagged with the point of sale location and the store, warehouse, or vendor that the product came from.
Warehouses and retail stores also have inventory databases that tell them how quickly something sells, when they need to buy new supply, and where that supply needs to go.
It kind of doesn’t matter where the sale comes from as long as you know where inventory is and is not needed.
That’s only from a shipping/logistics matter. However, whether sales are attributed to the e-commerce platform or the brick and mortar store is dependent on the company and their approach to the business. I’ve seen both scenarios and they each have their pros and cons. Ultimately though sometimes places do one or the other depending on what platform they want to show growth or revenue in (like a brick and mortar trying to increase e-commerce sales will count orders shipped to a store as e-commerce).
Correct. It really depends on how the business want do set things up. No one size fits all. Really all boils down to how the technology, data science, and finance teams want to solve the problem.
Ideally, if you can start over from scratch, it’s nice to have one generic data lake, then just run queries to tell you how a specific retail platform or location is performing.
I’d guess it depends on the chain. I know of one retailer where a store pickup would count as an in-store sale, which gave revenue to that particular store. This applied even if the in-store pickup required the item to be shipped to the store first
When I worked at Costco it did. And if you bought it at one store and returned it another that store gets the hit for the return.
