There are many things that an all-inclusive, omnichannel retail management program can do to make running your business easier. From simplifying the steps you need to take to complete orders to helping you find the best deal for your shipments, multichannel management software can save you a lot of time and energy.
The right management system can also prevent you from losing sales. If you have any hiccups in your inventory management process, you could be limiting your online sales.
Keeping track of your products
When you sell on multiple channels, as most modern retailers do, it can become complicated and confusing to keep track of what you have in stock. If you’re using different management systems for each channel or trying to monitor your inventory in manual spreadsheets, you greatly increase the chances that an error will occur.
Say you have a product that typically only sells in small numbers on your own website, your Amazon shop and your eBay store. A new customer finds your product through a search engine and orders a record number from your Amazon shop, claiming the rest of the inventory as gifts for an organization they are part of. If you’re using individual inventory management systems, another shopper could try to buy the product from a different channel before you can update its availability. If you promise a specific timeline for shipping, that deficient could affect your turnaround. That leaves a bad impression on the customer who has his order delayed because you couldn’t give an accurate timeline for his order fulfillment.
When you use omnichannel software, all of your inventories are tracked and instantly updated on each channel. So if you sell out on one, it will be automatically reflected on another. By keeping your customers informed and your numbers accurate, you create a better experience for them. They’ll trust you better and will be more likely to do business with you again than if they had been left in the lurch by inaccuracies on your stores.
Using inventory history to plan ahead
According to Multichannel Merchant, you can also increase sales by analyzing consumer order histories with all-in-one software. With omnichannel retailing software, your orders and inventory are easier to monitor at once, allowing you to capitalize on trends and tailor your products to the channels they do best on.
Marc Isaacson, the CEO of Village Green Apothecary, told Entrepreneur that this kind of tracking and monitoring helped his business as well. He said that by making sure he knew what the most popular products in his store were and ensuring he had weeks’ supplies available, he was able to keep out-of-stock occurrences down to only 0.5 percent.
Having an unbalanced inventory can have negative effects on your business. As much as not having products consumers want is a problem, overstocking will hurt you, too. Keeping too much of an unneeded product in stock wastes space and costs you money in storage that you don’t need to be spending.
It can be easy to make mistakes when you have to manage all that inventory on your own. A quick typo in a spreadsheet can throw your entire system off, and you can’t sync multiple files from different users. By managing your inventory with a connected software program, you can give your customers what they need without adding more time or expenses to your operations.
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