Many e-Commerce retailer do have an e-Commerce website and they simply just rely on their site to sell their products. Smart e-Commerce Marketers do sell their products on multiple platform while still managing their inventory, order processing and warehousing functionality through Magento. To help business owners, who do not know the process of multichannel selling techniques, I have written this blog post to help you.
At 23 Digital, we have helped many small business like yours to raise their revenues from 2 million per annum to 38 million per annum by effectively implementing smarter marketing tactics and helping them set up and optimise their store for effective multichannel ecommerce marketing. Now let’s discuss, what is multichannel e-retailing is?
what is multichannel e-retailing?
Multi-channel e-retailing is a marketing strategy that offers your customers a choice of ways to buy products from different channel. A true multi-channel e-retailing strategy covers purchases from a website, purchase from marketplaces like eBay, Amazon, Rakuten and comparison shopping sites. The aim of a multi-channel retailing strategy is to maximize revenue and loyalty by offering your customers choice and convenience.
In today’s marketplace, there are so many different options available for your customer to purchase from. So in order to optimise your chance of them actually choosing you over the competition, you need to make sure that you are everywhere they shop online. You need to list your products in additional sales channels wherever your customers are.
However, in doing the multichannel strategy, as it helps your businesses generate more revenue, it could also potentially hurt your business if you don’t have the proper processes and systems in place to actually help you manage those additional channels.
So today’s blog post, we are going to explore not only potential challenges involved in expanding to different channels, but also discuss how you can overcome that or prevent that occurring at all. We will also discuss about how Magento ecommerce platform and multichannel e-retailing work together to manage your multichannel strategy effectively.
Common Challenges associated with Multichannel Selling
Some of the common challenges with multichannel e-retailing are:
- Time consuming and prone to error
- Log into each system separately to download/process order
- Manual updates to systems lends itself to error.
- Inventory Management issues
- ‘Available in stock’ levels are inaccurate – often resulting in the same item being sold twice while you had only 1 in stock.
- Your customer service/satisfaction levels decline
- When backorders occur and/or orders not processed efficiently.
- Lack of visibility across your business.
- Ability to view/process all orders, see trends in sales etc.
As discussed above, if these challenges are not overcome effectively, or you do not have workaround to it, it could potentially hurt your business. So how do you overcome these challenges?
How to optimise your business for multi-channel e-retailing or selling?
1.   Implement a multichannel back office solution
So one of the first thing you could do is to implement back office solution to overcome the challenges listed above. Basically you need a system that could do all the order processing from the time you received your order from any of the channel you are advertising to dispatching orders.
Here is what you need from your back office solution.
- Multichannel Order Management
- Monitor sales and fulfil orders from all sales channels from a single application
- Gain business intelligence on sales channels
- Process and Fulfil Orders Faster
- Process orders in batches
- Manage Multiple Magento stores
- Single Workflow for processing orders
2.   Ensure accurate inventory across channels.
Another way to optimise your business from multichannel selling is inventory management across all your channels to avoid same items being sold twice, or putting an order as backorder etc.
Here is what you should expect from a system is real time inventory updates to allowing you to manage complex inventory items.
- Real Time inventory Updates
- Monitory inventory across sales channels
- Ensure all sales channels are in sync
- Avoid stock out situations
- Easily manage complex inventory items
- Kits and bundled products
- Manage configurable and grouped products effectively
- Manage inventory automatically
- Avoid shipping mistakes
- Line items detailed on pick slips
3.   Process and Ship orders more efficiently
To effectively manage your multichannel selling, you need to make sure that your process about shipping your orders are managed efficiently.
There are few ways you can achieve this.
- Improve the pick and Pack stages
- Process orders using barcode scanning
- Ensure accuracy in picking and packing
- Fulfil orders more efficiently
- Integrate shipping to eliminate bottlenecks and ensure accuracy.
- Verify shipping addresses
- Print finished shipping labels
- Access tracking information
- Control shipping rates
- Ship orders in batches and more.
4.   Integrate supplier and PO management.
In order to succeed in e-commerce, you must make sure that your product SKUs are always growing and you have a separate team handling sourcing of new products, managing relationship with existing suppliers etc.
Here are few things that you would need in your back office system.
- Issue purchase orders with a few clicks
- Be alerted when inventory in nearing low level
- Issue a purchase ordered from the low quantity product screen or alert itself.
- Receive products ordered
- Inventory levels automatically updated
- Assign products wo warehouse and binds
- Backorder items put in processing
- Easily manage drop ship items
- Purchase orders automatically generated
- Send order with a few clicks
- Create a lead requests with new suppliers
As we discussed if you don’t have a solution to address common challenges through an effective back office system, your business could be in mess. At 23 Digital, we have an integrated system which will assist you in generating more sales for your business by advertising your products to multiple platforms and comparison sites as well as providing you tools to manage your backend and be able to do all those tasks efficiently to address these common challenges.
I hope this has been helpful, please do leave your questions or comments below.
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