Since the beginning of ecommerce, shoppers have performed some fairly consistent mental math when buying online. The larger the item, the longer they were willing to wait for it. Phone cases or beauty products had to come today or tomorrow. But a new coffee table? That could wait days, maybe even weeks.
That calculus is crumbling. We live in the “everything now” economy, and consumers expect their purchases at their door within a day or two no matter the size.
A case in point: home goods are on fire on TikTok Shop, which was once the place for $20 impulse buys. Our data shows sales of above-ground pools and spas have more than doubled since last year. Outdoor furniture is up 275%. These are purchases that run to several hundred dollars. Consumers are making them with a tap of the phone, and they expect the same ease when it comes to delivery.
For retailers, this is an opportunity wrapped in a hard operational problem. Big and bulky products are where every assumption in modern ecommerce gets stress-tested at once. These products carry the highest last-mile costs, the most complicated returns processes and the least margin for error on inventory placement. But get it right and it builds resilience into fulfillment across categories and makes delivery a reason to buy from you.
I run operations at one of the top five sellers of big and bulky products across most major marketplaces. I’ve seen what retailers do right and what they get wrong. Here are the three factors that brands and retailers with successful delivery operations get right.
They Treat Fulfillment as a Competitive Edge
Here’s a number every retailer should know. Every day shaved off the delivery window produces an average 12.5% sales lift. For big and bulky products, the industry average still sits above five days. There’s probably no bigger lever a retailer can pull to boost sales than accelerating delivery times. Delivery speed behaves like prices. It is forecastable, controllable and it shows up directly in revenue.
It means that delivery must be a factor in every decision. For any brand or retailer selling through a marketplace, delivery speed is critical. There’s no faster way to fall afoul of the algorithm than to be late fulfilling orders. But committing to fast delivery of big and bulky products pays dividends across retailers’ operations. It forces careful consideration of delivery logistics and returns processes — a customer can’t simply send an outdoor sauna or waterslide back in the mail. It also forces those factors to be fully integrated into calculations of unit economics. That rigor builds fulfillment muscle that can be applied to a retailer’s entire assortment.
They Position their Stock for Success
Successful fulfillment operations follow the realtor’s mantra: location, location, location. In a country the size of the U.S., stock placement is a hugely consequential decision. Rapid fulfillment requires stock to be staged strategically in warehouses in multiple states, whether these belong to a marketplace, retailer or partner. For brands that sell across Amazon, Walmart, Target and TikTok Shop, this adds complexity, because demand moves differently on each channel and inventory has to be placed against each of them.
Strategic stock placement has a major impact on delivery speed. For instance, All Season Power, the maker of the Snow Joe and Sun Joe brands, cut delivery times by up to 70% through this strategy and its Pro line rose to number one in Amazon’s snow removal category.
They Forecast Weekly, Not Quarterly
Placement only works when the forecast behind it is sound. For big and bulky items, which consume expensive warehouse space, a bad forecast costs in both directions. Order too much and retailers are holding oversized stock you cannot clear quickly. Order too little and you miss the season outright, because many of these categories are far more seasonal than the ecommerce average and often have longer supply-chain lead times.
A hard focus on forecasting was one of the techniques Crown Shades, which sells bulky pop-up canopies, used to cut click-to-delivery from 42 hours to 31 hours. Weekly forecasting reviews kept the right stock in the right places and contributed to a 30% increase in conversions. Disciplined fulfillment of a hard-to-ship product feeds straight back into revenue.
The Hardest Category Sets the Standard
A reliable big and bulky operation lets a retailer profitably sell what its competitors avoid. It also produces a better fulfillment model for everything else in the catalog. Master the economics of the hardest goods to move and you have built something that will hold strong when fuel costs, marketplace fees and delivery expectations are all working against you.
The impulse behavior that used to belong to small goods is arriving in categories nobody designed their networks for. The retailers who solve it will not just win the pool sale. They will have a delivery model that survives whatever the next few years do to the cost of moving goods.
Owen Carr is Chief Merchandising Officer at Spreetail, an ecommerce marketplace accelerator for big and bulky products.
