Perhaps no greater ecommerce trend was accelerated during the COVID-19 pandemic than the urgent need to harmonize digital experiences with physical stores. A small subset of online-only stores, like chewy.com, thrived the past few years because of the explosion of customers forced to shop online. But the more consistent trend was consumers sticking with familiar brick-and-mortar brands or stores as dollars flooded to online purchases and those incumbent companies trying to figure out how to merge their digital storefronts with existing physical assets.

BOPIS, curbside pickup, and ship from store all became a prioritized focus point since 2019. We noticed companies didn't focus on this until roughly this size, mostly because smaller companies don't have the available capital to both buildout ecommerce-centric fulfillment centers and physical stores. With that said, we certainly spoke with several DTC companies with only one FC and less than $100M in annual online sales who had already invested in opening physical stores pre-pandemic. Therefore the range is large for when this is a focus, and we pick this stage only because it was the average amongst a large sample.

Regardless, it's a hard problem to solve. The most important component is the integration between the frontend store with backend inventory. Fortunately inventory management systems have gotten much better at providing real-time inventory visibility at warehouses. Unfortunately, store-based fulfillment, whether via inbound pickup or outbound shipping, depends on the same visibility on inventory within stores. This is a notoriously hard problem and continues to be the key bottleneck to providing this option to customers.