Industry Digest: Distribution, Retail, and Commerce: Fashion, Footwear, and Apparel

SUMMARY

Fashion, apparel, and footwear businesses face constant change. Styles frequently change with seasonal stock change-over. Today’s fashion world demands flexibility with omnichannel purchasing, returns, and exchanges.

Fashion and apparel retailers, etailers, and distributors require specialized software to track inventory by size, style, color, and other attributes. Connections with multiple online marketplaces, commerce storefronts, brick-and mortar retail outlets, or pop-up stores with point of sale are essential for growing sales with seamless connections to back office ERP applications for order fulfillment, shipping, financial analysis, and reporting.

Companies using legacy ERP or entry-level accounting applications and digitally native retailers looking to expand into pop-up locations struggle to manage omnichannel experiences while synchronizing systems with manual data exports and imports. As a result, information is delayed and inaccurate resulting in late fulfillment, canceled orders, and unhappy customers. Conversely, modern ERP applications couple front-end commerce with back-end ERP functionality for a holistic, bi-directional system to manage every part of the business for a better customer experience and faster order fulfillment.

This Industry Digest provides an overview of the fashion, footwear, and apparel industry from a retail and wholesale distribution perspective with insights into the industry’s future, critical features to consider when evaluating a new ERP application, and a list of resources for additional information.

Fashion Apparel and Footwear Industry Digest