Bells Shoes has been a retailer in Buxton, UK since 1890 and first earned a reputation for quality footwear in the 1960’s. They first launched online in 2007 and expanded rapidly through selling on eBay and Amazon. They’ve moved from running e-commerce above their store to operating out of a purpose built office and warehouse employing over 50 staff. The Buxton store continues to serve the local community with the wider family business including 3 Clarks franchise stores as well as another independent store in Leek, Staffordshire.
Bells Shoes stock 25,000 SKUs and hold an average of 70,000 units of stock across four warehouses. Stock integrity was their number one challenge. Getting an accurate inventory level on their website and marketplaces so they only sold what’s available to ship. This was causing the most pain and 8-10% of orders being taken were unfulfillable. They had continued on using their RMS Dynamics stock control system from their bricks and mortar only days which meant they had a conventional ‘shop-style’ warehouse layout by brand and style when in reality they needed an e-commerce specific WMS.
Bells Shoes use integrations such as Visualsoft, Royal Mail & DPD via OpenDespatch and they were looking for a system to help them with the challenges they were facing as their e-commerce business grew, and they needed a solution quickly. This is where Peoplevox’s Warehouse Management System (WMS) proved to be a suitable choice for what they needed. Bells Shoes implemented Peoplevox’s warehouse management system in 12 weeks from starting at the beginning of August 2015.
The implementation of Peoplevox’s WMS, and the execution of the WMS’ unbeatable e-commerce workflows, gave Bells Shoes’ leaders the durable efficiency that it was looking for. It also gave its tech stack the necessary strength to support the store’s rapid growth.
Bells Shoes improved their order fulfilment to 99.2%, with the remaining .8% of out of stocks being caused by marketplace delays. They’re implementing ChannelAdvisor integrated to Peoplevox to help with this.
On top of this, the picking speed of its operators has really accelerated; warehouse staff now pick and despatch 400 orders during a typical 8 hour shift.
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