#multichannelerp

Selling on marketplaces such as Amazon, eBay, Walmart, and shopify brings sales from massive volume of customers. Millions of people from all over the world shop from these websites every day. Online e-commerce retailers expand their business by using more and more selling channels for similar products.

But before this expansion a question pop up in mind how to manage all these channels so that business keep running without any hitches and glitches. The main problem arises when inventory data shows disparity and seller lose a sale due to items not being in stock. That’s why inventory software is so vital for multi-channel business.

A good and powerful multi-channel inventory software will eradicate all these errors automatically and keep your inventory stock levels synchronized. It will also manage your business’s back end operations such as accounting, purchase, shipping and sales reports.

Let us have a go into a little more details about how a multi-channel inventory management software can boost your sales.

Product Promotion

An inventory management software for your multi-channel business help to identify what customer is looking for and quickly find the similar items that are available too. For example, a customer is looking for a coffee machine the seller could instantly check if stock is available and for the model matches the requirement of the customer is in stock too. This upsell prospect might have lost if seller didn’t know what was in stock.

Brand Loyalty

Happy customers make repeat purchases and also recommend your services and products further. If a customer cannot get the product quantity the want or frequently experiencing delayed delivery they would look for another retailer that can meet their demands. Better inventory management gives happy customers for your business and a powerful inventory management can take care of that.

Prevents Understocking

For multiple channel selling the reliable balance of inventory stock across all channels is a great success. Unable to fulfill orders due to out-of-stock situation may distort business reputation. The aim of a multi-channel inventory software is to reflect accurate stock levels allowing seller to gain 100% visibility of stock levels which eliminates low stock situations and let the sale come in hands on time.

Quick Lead Generation

The time it takes by seller to fulfill the customer order is a factor that has a key influence on customer satisfaction. Customer prefer to look for sellers who can deliver order as soon as possible. A powerful inventory software will let seller know the lead time of the product and its turnover ratio.

Demand Forecast

The prediction of current sales pattern of products by an inventory software is the other great feature to boost your business sales. In peak season failing to meet customer demand will damage the business profile and seller’s reputation is most likely to go down. The demand forecast will help to predict sales order volume and remain proactive for restocking decisions.

Order management is as an ecosystem of categories that integrates every assignment and action involved with taking and filling orders, containing the many interconnected functions that must work together for the complete order management process to run efficiently.

Customers expect an all-in-one shopping experience from your brand and from the moment they hit the button that finalizes their order, they are expecting timely receipt of the particular goods they have purchased.

Here in this article, we will look at how a multi-channel order management software can automate your business.

To enable this efficient customer experience, businesses need to confirm they are effectively managing the following three stages of the multichannel order management process.

1. Receiving orders

When placing orders, over 60 percent of shoppers want to see the position of a retailer’s inventory stock. Therefore, if your sales channels are not controlled from a single platform, you are incapable to provide customers with any real-time inventory stock levels.It can also feel like you are managing different businesses and you put yourself at risk of overselling. By managing orders at the point of sale, you can process orders more rapidly and speed up dispatch times.Lessen the risk of overselling by tracking your inventory stock across multiple channels. This means you are neither dealing with orders that you cannot fill due to stock-outs, nor youwill miss out on bulky orders because your stock isn't divided between the different channels.

2. Picking, packing, and shipping

The picking, packing, and shipping stage is where blunders are most likely to occur, and even small mistakes can add up. Picking errors can be costly, not only causing product returns, but they also mess with inventory stock levels. The extra time required to reprocess orders can affect customer contentment and reliability.Customers also do not want the trouble to return items;mainly it was an error from your end. If you do choose to omit the return, you miss inventory stock that was intended to be a source of revenue. Systematizing the picking process should keep mistakes to a minimum – consider using tools like a barcode scanner to advance precision.

3. Delivery

The final and most serious stage in successful multi-channel order management processing is getting the product to the customer. Fast and precise delivery will make the mainstream of consumers feel optimistic about shopping with your brand again.

Consider that over 50 percent of shoppers consider fast delivery a top priority, choosing one retailer over another, simply because they offer more delivery opportunities and they would select to stay with a business if it offered a reliability program with free next day delivery.

Multichannel order management

Multichannel order management is a challenge for every fast-growing business. A brand experiencing high-growth must concentrate on managing high order volumes across multiple channels, while still delivering extraordinary customer service.Where earlier manual order management processes availed, high volume order processing requires a scalable solution to evade time-consuming mistakes, disorganizations, poor customer service, and lost sales. Modernize order fulfillment activities by incorporating order management processes with fulfillment, shipping, and inventory tracking systems.Associate your marketplaces and online store into a single platform that tracks and synchronizes your whole inventory stock across all channels. Providing shoppers with exact order status with total distinguishability into all orders.

Selling on multiple-channel provides you access to more and more customers and gives your sales a high pitch. However, to remain organized across different channels you need an efficient strategy around your order management operations to keep your business running smoothly and stand out among the thousands of competitors. Having a multi-channel order management e-Commerce software provides you a seamless integration of all the operations associated with order management for multiple retail stores. It enables quick order processing even though orders are coming from different channels and have variable formats.  

We have come up with top benefits to have a multi-channel order management software for your retail business on Amazon, eBay, shopify, Walmart, Magneto, and Wish etc.

I. Automation saves Times

A multi-channel e-Commerce software lets you automate everything about selling online. It provides centralized order processing features to manage orders online, offline and from a website from a single dashboard.  It addresses everything automatically from invoicing to shipping and from tracking products to replenish stock levels and save time and extensive paperwork involved in these operations.

II. Reduce Errors in order processing

There are high chances for errors and manual mistakes for the orders coming from multiple channels. With an automated multi-channel e-Commerce Order Management, system retailers can have direct access to the centralized data relating to the inventory and warehouses. This eliminates the errors and blunders as there is less manual intervention and prevents loss of data and security breaching issues.

III. Provide Real-time information

Updating inventory individually on each channel becomes a hectic job if you choose to sell on multiple marketplaces. Inventory needs to be updated after every sale, return or exchange. The order management software updates inventory on a real-time basis and keeps the inventory data consistent across each channel and saves you from over-selling  and under-selling and keeps your customer satisfied.

IV. Manage your order remotely  

Having a Cloud based multi-channel e-Commerce Management software lets you access your system from anywhere in the world to process your orders. You are not necessarily at your workplace to access the system instead you can have your order management software app installed on your phone which lets you control your data and deal with your customer remotely.

V. Direct Shipment from Warehouse

For selling across multiple channels, you may have multiple warehouses at different locations. Using an order management system, you can have the facility to assign your order to the nearest warehouse location for on-time delivery. Also for a particular item you can choose based on the location and quantity of order from which warehouse it needs to be delivered.  

VI. Better analytics of Sales Data

To improve business effectiveness and take up-to-date decisions, sales data should be presented in a comprehensive yet straightforward way. Being a multichannel retailer and to be better equipped with ideas and formulate effective strategies for upcoming sales, you need a multi-channel e-Commerce order management software to generate custom reports to give better insight of sales patterns across multiple stores.

Selling on Amazon is not always as smooth and easy as it looks. There are many disappointing aspects of selling on amazon about which sellers need to know before they get themselves into any trouble.  

Inventory Management is the key to successful selling on any e-Commerce business. A controlled and well-managed inventory on Amazon is accounted for business performance and that is why it is necessary to know that there are certain shortcomings in Amazon inventory and how a third party multi-channel inventory management for Amazon is going to relieve you from this issue.

Excessive Inventory Fees

If your inventory is stored in Amazon warehouse, and your inventory is inactive and stocks are not on the shelf Amazon will still continue to charge you their monthly fees for that inventory.  Moreover, there are other fees associated with the Amazon Inventory as well such as long-term storage fee and inventory storage overage fee. You end up spending your earnings into inventory fees. The integration of a multi-channel inventory management for Amazon is a solution to avoid unnecessary fees, just a one time monthly charge no matter if your product is inactive.

Product Information issues

Sometimes Amazon messes up the product information. Therefore, if any item has misinformation it takes a long hectic procedure to get Amazon to fix it. Sellers make phone calls multiple times and are on the call for hours to Amazon to get them fixed and it takes days and sometimes weeks and the seller is most likely to have a huge sale loss during this duration. While using a third party multi-channel inventory management software for amazon usually it does not happen but if it does then simply sending an email can fix the problem within 24 hours.

Shipping Labels

Shipping label has always been an issue on Amazon reported by sellers many times. The Shipping Label is not made on Amazon sometimes and customers complain that they did not receive their order and claim to send it again. Seller has to lose in this claim even if the customer is manipulating and resend the product. Multi-channel inventory management software for amazon provides an easy and transparent method for shipping labeling and tracking which help you not to mess up your sales and maintain the business integrity.

Negative Shipping Feedback

Moreover, Amazon does not remove negative customer feedback if it is related to shipping. It says the problem with shipping carriers is not Amazon’s issue. This negative feedback really does affect the seller and customer tend to look for other sellers for the same product.

When a buyer wants to return an item Amazon charges a fee to the seller for refunding. Amazon claims for free return and refunding of the product but sellers end up paying a fee for that refund or either the return shipping charges no matter why the buyer didn’t like the product and want to return.

Poorly trained Customer Services