How robots are helping fashion seller Boozt drive fast order fulfillment

When it comes to the e-commerce experience more than half of consumers, 63%, cite delivery choice as the top factor.

In fact, the right delivery choices and order tracking features matter more to new and loyal e-commerce shoppers than loyalty programs, perks and payment options. Consumers are expecting fast delivery and they’ll easily move on to another brand if they can get the needed item quicker. Slow delivery has caused 63% of consumers to switch retailers, 60% to not purchase again from a retailer and 43% to abandon a cart or stop shopping with that retailer.

One Nordic fashion and lifestyle retailer is striving hard to ensure delivery is meeting today’s consumer expectations when it comes to order fulfillment and order delivery.

Tapping robots for fast fulfillment

Boozt is a multi-brand webstore which operates Boozt.com and a Nordic fashion outlet called Booztlet.com. The Boozt.com site has a customer base of over 3.5 million.

The Swedish e-commerce company serves 14 European countries with over 900,000 items from 700 fashion and lifestyle brands, 250 home brands and 260 beauty brands.

In 2017 it partnered with AutoStore, a technology company that develops order-fulfillment solutions, to deploy a robotic fleet in its warehouse operations. Founded in 1996 AutoStore offers both hardware and software capabilities and the AutoStore technology is interoperable with other third-party solutions

“Having a reliable, accurate, and fast automated fulfillment system that can sort through our diverse inventory and select the right product for the right customer is essential for our operations,” Tobias Sjölin, CTO, Boozt fulfillment and logistics, said in an email interview. “With AutoStore empowered by Element Logic, we have over 1,150 robots helping us process 190,000 items daily and we’ve even been able to achieve a record-breaking 63-second order fulfillment.”

And when AutoStore debuted its latest robot, the R5 Pro Robot, Boozt brought it into the warehouse operations given it is built specifically for large-scale e-commerce operations the retailer knew it was something it needed to adopt.

“The top pain point we’re always trying to solve is how to fill orders as quickly and efficiently as possible to ensure our customers have a positive experience when they order through us,” said Sjölin.

AutoStore has played a “crucial role” in allowing Boozt to achieve just that by deploying the fastest storage and retrieval system per square foot in the world.

“With enhanced battery life, the R5 Pro has accelerated our productivity across multi-shift operations, enabling us to get our products in the hands of customers faster, while optimizing warehouse space and reducing overall infrastructure costs,” said Sjölin.

The evolution of R5 Pro

The R5 Pro robot was introduced in the fall of 2023, according to Jon Schechter, vice president, North American Business Development, AutoStore. The robot reflects the latest iteration of the company’s advanced storage and retrieval robots tailored to meet the unique needs of large-scale e-commerce operations.

“With the rapid expansion of e-commerce, retailers are challenged with processing higher volumes of orders within shorter time frames and face unpredictable spikes in demand,” said Schechter in an email interview. “We developed the R5 Pro Robot to address these challenges through heightened productivity, flexibility, accuracy, and efficiency, making our automated fulfillment solution ideal for large-scale e-commerce operations.”

The R5 Pro Robot boasts several key enhancements. A big one is that it reduces the number of robots required on the same grid by up to 15% via optimized charging which means an 18% increase in throughput per robot. That translates to fulfilling order even more efficiency. Having less robots ties into space and cost optimization for the warehouse operation and lowers total ownership costs.

“With the efficiency, accuracy, speed, and productivity of the R5 Pro Robot, we’re able to provide leading retailers like Puma, Dick’s, BestBuy, Gucci and more with the world’s fastest automated fulfillment system per square foot in the world,” said Schechter.