Chain aims to fill online orders faster this holiday season

Sona Chalwa's first day of work as chief operating officer of Kohl's coincided with Cyber Monday last year. To get more familiar with Kohl's newest weapons in the online shopping wars, she spent the day in a place you might not expect - the chain's brick-and-mortar stores.

Employees gave her a close-up look at a service that allows customers to buy items over the internet and pick them up in-store, and a program to ship people's online orders from stores - not warehouses.

What she found wasn't exactly a paragon of efficiency.

'We went to the backroom, and we took a look at a (pickup) order,” Chalwa said. 'And it was handwritten - scribbled.”

There were other hitches, too. Pickup orders were sometimes stored hundreds of feet away from the desk where customers came to retrieve them, slowing service. There was no route-planning technology for gathering up orders speedily - employees simply used their knowledge of the store's floor plan to make their best guess.

Workers had to use separate apps for fulfilling orders that required store pickup and those that would be shipped from the store.

This holiday season, Kohl's is running a much more sophisticated operation, having added new technology, more store workers focused on online order fulfillment and different tactics for stockpiling items once the orders have been collected.

The company's hope is that all these efforts help it improve in an area where the stakes are growing only larger. Last year during the holidays, Kohl's fulfilled some 30 percent of its online orders in its stores, and this year it expects that share to grow to 40 percent. And the store pickup customer, in particular, is an important one to satisfy: Chalwa says these 'click-and-collect” shoppers tend to be some of the chain's most loyal and engaged shoppers. (More than 75 percent of them are enrolled in Kohl's loyalty program.)

The changes at Kohl's offer a window into an important dynamic in the retail industry right now. Traditional brick-and-mortar stores are, of course, hustling to win your shopping dollars with appealing merchandise and good service.

But they also are engaged in a less visible but equally important race to revamp their supply chains to cater to our want-it-now ways.

Last holiday season, retailers overall didn't do such a great job when it came to executing click-and-collect programs. According to a study by consultancy Kurt Salmon, some 60 percent of such orders placed on Cyber Monday ran into problems.

Customers were given the wrong items, or orders were canceled because the product was actually out of stock.