Guide · Omnichannel
Turn your stores into fulfilment centres.
Done right, your stores ship orders faster and cheaper than a warehouse ever could. Done as a software switch, they strip their own shelves and crowd their own aisles. This is a floor and labour problem first, a routing problem second. Here is the order that keeps the experience intact.
This guide, in 6 parts
The prize is real. So is the way it backfires.
Your stores already sit where your customers are. Picking an online order from a shelf and handing it over, or shipping it from the back room, is faster and cheaper than routing everything through one distant warehouse. That is why the click-and-collect numbers above are not a fad, and why the retailers who do it well fulfil most online orders from stores.
The trap is treating it as a setting. Flip on order routing and the engine does exactly what you asked: it finds the nearest unit and sends a picker for it, with no view of the shopper standing in the same aisle, or the bestseller wall it just stripped. The technology works. The store is what breaks.
« The routing engine optimises for the order in hand, and against the shopper in the aisle. »
It is a floor problem before it is a routing problem.
Almost everything that goes wrong with store fulfilment happens on the floor, not in the code. A picker blocks the fitting-room queue at the busiest hour. The shelf the routing engine trusted was wrong, so the order is promised and then cancelled. The fast-selling size gets grabbed for an online order and the walk-in who wanted it finds an empty peg.
None of those are bugs. They are decisions nobody made: what the store is allowed to give away, who picks and when, how thin the floor is allowed to get. Make those decisions first and the routing engine becomes what it should be, the last and easiest step. Skip them and no amount of software saves the experience. The same logic runs through our wider omnichannel playbook: fix the join, then buy the tools.
Decide what the store is allowed to give away.
This is the document the routing engine should be obeying. Made by category, by the people who run the floor, before a single order routes. Four calls cover most of it.
The display unit and the last one on the shelf
The item a walk-in can see and touch is the reason they came in. If an online order can pull the last unit off the floor, the shopper standing in front of an empty peg leaves with nothing, and you have traded a sale you had for one you might lose anyway.
The best-selling size or colour at peak
The size that sells out first is the one routing will grab first, because it is the one being ordered everywhere. Protect a floor buffer on the fast movers, or your busiest store quietly strips its own bestsellers to feed the website.
Deep back-stock and slow movers
Stock that is not earning its shelf space is the safest thing to ship. This is where store fulfilment pays: clearing depth and long-tail sizes that a single distribution centre would never hold, closer to the customer and cheaper to send.
Anything the floor cannot replenish in a day
If a picked unit will not be replaced before tomorrow's shoppers arrive, the floor goes thin. Decide the replenishment lead time first; let routing give away only what the back room can put back in time.
Decide the rules, choreograph the picking, then route.
Three moves, and the order is the whole point. The routing comes last, not first.
Decide the give-away rules before anything routes
Write down, by category, what the store may release to an online order and what it must protect: the display unit, the floor buffer on fast movers, the replenishment lead time. This is a merchandising and floor decision, made with the people who run the floor, not a setting an integration ships with. Routing without rules will always optimise for the order in hand and against the shopper in the aisle.
Choreograph the picking so it never crosses the shopper
Map the pick path, the staging point and the labour against the floor: who picks, when, and through which aisles, so a picker is never blocking the fitting-room queue or working the bestseller wall at the busiest hour. In-store picking already costs roughly 1.5 to 2 times a distribution centre's; done blind, it costs the experience too. Give the back room a real staging zone before you give it a single order.
Only then turn on order routing, store by store
With rules set and the picking choreographed, switch on routing for the stores that are built for it: enough back-room space, manageable traffic, stock you can trust. Start with a few, watch the floor, and let some stores sit it out. A store that is small, busy or thin on stock should keep doing pickup and the walk-in experience, not pack boxes that empty its shelves.
Each move leans on the one before it, and all three lean on knowing what is actually on the shelf in real time. That live view, and the picking and reservation tools that ride on it, are store technology, not a website feature. We cover the kit that makes the floor legible in the connected floor.
What it looks like when it goes wrong.
This is not a hypothetical, and the most useful proof comes from a retailer that pushed store fulfilment hard. By 2024, Target was fulfilling the vast majority of its online orders from stores. Cheaper, faster, closer to the customer. It also meant pickers working the same floor as shoppers, in stores that were never built for it.
So in 2025 Target reversed course in the stores where it hurt. Locations that were too small or too busy were told they could "shut down their pack stations and sit this one out," and "focus exclusively on drive-up business, pickup orders and the in-store experience." As the company put it, stores would still fulfil most online orders, "but which stores may change."
That is the entire lesson in one move. The economics of store fulfilment are real, but they are not free, and the bill arrives on the selling floor. The retailer that got furthest had to pull fulfilment back out of the stores that could not carry it. Deciding which stores are built for it, and what they may give away, is the work. The routing was never the hard part.
« Stores will keep fulfilling most online orders. Which stores does the damage, or does not. »
Frequently asked.
Is store-as-fulfilment a software project or a store project?
A store project that software finishes. The order-routing engine is the last piece, not the first. Before it earns its keep you have to decide what each store may give away, protect the floor on your fast movers, and choreograph the picking so it does not cross the shopper. Buy the routing once those decisions are made; turn it on first and it will optimise against your own selling floor.
Will picking online orders hurt the in-store experience?
It can, and the honest answer is that it depends entirely on choreography. Pickers competing with shoppers for the same aisles and the same stock thin the shelves and crowd the floor; that is exactly why Target, in 2025, pulled fulfilment out of stores that were too small or too busy and let them focus on pickup and the walk-in experience. Map the pick path and the labour against real store traffic first, and the two can run side by side.
Which stores should fulfil, and which should not?
Not all of them, and that is the point. Stores with back-room space, manageable traffic and stock you can trust are built to fulfil; small, high-traffic or thin-stock stores should keep doing pickup and the floor, not pack orders. Picking the right stores beats switching every store on. The retailers who lead at this fulfil the majority of online orders from stores, but which stores changes by design.
Why does our stock say available when the shelf is empty?
Because store inventory is right only 70 to 90 percent of the time, against over 99.5 percent in a distribution centre. Routing trusts that number; when it is wrong, it promises a unit that is not there and someone has to cancel or chase it. Before you let routing give stock away, tighten counts on the categories you fulfil and hold a safety buffer, so the system never sells the last one it cannot find. The real-time view that makes this safe lives in the store technology, not the website.
We do not want to wreck the floor. Where do we start?
Start with the give-away rules and one category, not a network roll-out. Decide what that category may release and what it must protect, choreograph the picking for one store, then turn routing on for that store and watch the floor for a fortnight before adding the next. Small and reversible beats fast and everywhere. This sequence is also the safest way to learn what your floor and your stock can actually take.
Much of this is yours to decide. The give-away rules and the pick path belong to the people who run your floor, and they should write them.
Bring us in when the rules, the picking and the routing have to become one working system across the website and the stores, and stay working through a peak. Knowing where each customer crosses between the store and the screen is its own map; we keep ours private, but if you are weighing which stores should fulfil and which should protect the floor, that is the conversation. See how we think about it in the Hub Map.
Weighing store fulfilment?
No deck, no gate. A working session on your real floor and your real stock, with the operators who would make it run.