Ecommerce is beginning to overtake shopping offline in popularity for businesses and customers. Customers can buy things from home and have them delivered straight to their door. Meanwhile, companies can save money by cutting out physical stores. Many new entrepreneurs choose to sell online because the costs are often minimal compared to other practices that need premises. If you run an ecommerce business, you want to maximize your selling potential as much as you can. This leads to many business owner selling their products across many shop fronts and websites. But this practice can bring up some issues, such as managing your inventory. If you sell across several online platforms, here are some solutions to some common problems.
One Shopping Cart
One of the best things to make your multiple platforms easier to use for both you and your customers is a unified shopping cart. Instead of having a separate checkout for each of the storefronts that you use, you can put them all together. For example, using a service such as Magento, you can connect several stores so items in one cart can come from different places. There are lots of WordPress plugins you can use too if you’re using the platform for your website.
Managing Inventory
Keeping your inventory straight can be hard when you list the same items in different stores. When an item sells on one site, you could end up having to adjust your inventory across a dozen others to ensure that you don’t sell the same thing twice or more. You can solve this sticky problem with an ERP software package that includes multi-channel inventory management. A good ERP (enterprise resource planning) program will have many other useful features for selling cross-platform too. These range from analytical tools to customer relationship management.
Order Processing
Without something to help you manage order processing on your different stores, things can quickly descend into chaos. Keeping track of orders across multiple channels can be extremely time-consuming. You can use order management software or an ERP with the right features to have all your orders flow into one system. You’ll avoid the disaster of missing an order or sending something out late with some smart software to help you stay on top of everything and prioritize your orders.
Customer and Sales Insight
Gaining insights into your customers’ behavior and the sales you make is essential. But it can be much harder when you have to watch several storefronts. Luckily, it’s easy to find tools that help you gain insight into your sales and customer interaction on all your channels. You can use analytics tools to watch the performance of your sites in one central place so you know what’s working and what isn’t. With the right software, you can see which sites make you the most sales and what customers respond to.
Managing sales across multiple online stores can be fiddly, but with the correct tools it doesn’t have to be a nightmare. Keep everything organized by looking for the right solution for you, instead of accepting the chaos of managing without.
