this post was submitted on 27 Oct 2023
27 points (88.6% liked)

Ask Lemmy

26690 readers
2381 users here now

A Fediverse community for open-ended, thought provoking questions

Please don't post about US Politics.


Rules: (interactive)


1) Be nice and; have funDoxxing, trolling, sealioning, racism, and toxicity are not welcomed in AskLemmy. Remember what your mother said: if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all. In addition, the site-wide Lemmy.world terms of service also apply here. Please familiarize yourself with them


2) All posts must end with a '?'This is sort of like Jeopardy. Please phrase all post titles in the form of a proper question ending with ?


3) No spamPlease do not flood the community with nonsense. Actual suspected spammers will be banned on site. No astroturfing.


4) NSFW is okay, within reasonJust remember to tag posts with either a content warning or a [NSFW] tag. Overtly sexual posts are not allowed, please direct them to either [email protected] or [email protected]. NSFW comments should be restricted to posts tagged [NSFW].


5) This is not a support community.
It is not a place for 'how do I?', type questions. If you have any questions regarding the site itself or would like to report a community, please direct them to Lemmy.world Support or email [email protected]. For other questions check our partnered communities list, or use the search function.


Reminder: The terms of service apply here too.

Partnered Communities:

Tech Support

No Stupid Questions

You Should Know

Reddit

Jokes

Ask Ouija


Logo design credit goes to: tubbadu


founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

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)?

top 7 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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).

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

That makes the most sense to me. The employees have to receive, process, package and deliver that to a person, which is pretty in store heavy.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

This is how it happens for most large retailers from what I can gather. You can subtract that from the sales pretty easily though, it would be in the monthly sales reports and we even had a way to figure it out on a daily basis with the comptroller.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

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.