All retailers, whether online or bricks and mortar, have a legal responsibility to ensure they are not selling age-restricted products to underage customers. This could be tricky to control for companies with several sales channels, as in the case with sector-disrupter, BUILT/.
BUILT/ provides customers with a choice of purchasing methods for building materials, both online and off-line with products pre-ordered and either collected at a specified time, or delivered direct to the customer.
Many of BUILT/’s products carry age restrictions, however, so whatever channel they go through, the appropriate checks need to be made.
The three channels available, are:
- The goods are delivered to a locker
- The goods are delivered to the customer’s location
- The customer picks the items up at an arranged time from the BUILT/ warehouse.
In the first two instances, the customer must complete an online registration, part of which involves agreeing to terms of business which include a statement that they are over the age of 18, so the responsibility lies with the purchasing organisation.
Products ordered for warehouse pick-up, however, are treated a little differently, and this needed to be reflected in the way WAERlinx managed these orders. WAERlinx’ in-built flexibility meant that our development team could easily add a simple indicator so that items with an age-restriction are marked as such in WAERlinx.
When these are presented for collection, a flag simply indicates that the staff member needs to check the customer’s ID. A message appears within the despatch screen with the words “Have you checked the age of the customer? Products XYZ have restrictions.”
Selecting Yes or No is then written back to NetSuite on the item Fulfilment Interface, providing a clear trail for legal compliance.
WAERlinx – leading the way in warehouse management.