Check out our Industrial terms glossary
Cross Docking
A warehouse strategy of moving of goods directly from the receiving dock to the shipping dock, reducing the handling and storage steps in between to a minimum. In practice, the goods pass through the warehouse only from an administrative point of view, while physically they are not even placed on the shelves. In these cases, the goods are accepted and “taken on” administratively when a barcode is read as items are unloaded from the supplier’s truck. A radio frequency system communicates the arrival of the goods to the processors and the same radio frequency system sends instructions to “re-label” the goods and load them on a departing vehicle, sometimes indicating which “order” the goods must be loaded on the vehicle with. Cross docking happens very frequently and is typical employed in the distribution of food products and more specifically perishable items such as dairy products, vegetables and fruit.
Cross Merchandising
The definition of Cross Merchandising in the retail sector refers to the strategy of displaying or putting together products from different product categories to drive sales.
