Steve Weber
Multichannel Professional
Steve’s more than 20 years of industry experience has had a hand in helping hundreds of retailers streamline and improve their supply chain operations.
Shopify Adds New Multi-Location Inventory Capabilities: What it Means for Your Business
Over the last 10 years we’ve had countless conversations with merchants, especially multi-store retailers, who are surprised to learn that their eCommerce platform is incapable of displaying inventory by store. Facing large competitors that do have this capability, this oversight is extremely disappointing. Without it, merchants are unable to route web orders to the closest store for fulfillment or allow customers to pick up in store. It also hinders them from shipping product from 3PL locations or even suppliers that are closer to the buyer.
In all cases, these merchants have had few choices other than to spend a small fortune customizing their shopper experience or implementing a third-party order management system (that’s often overkill for their relatively simple requirements, and that may still not make their store data visible to eCommerce shoppers).
Realizing this challenge for retailers, Shopify recently announced that they’re adding new capabilities to track inventory updates and fulfillments across multiple locations.
This is big news! We’re pretty excited about it over here at nChannel and what it means for merchants, whether you’re already using Shopify or not. (more…)
Why Retailers Should Integrate Their Accounting System
(This post was originally published on October 23rd, 2013. We’ve updated it for accuracy and completeness.)
All merchants deal with the challenge of managing the data that their operations generate. You must pull orders, update item information, update inventory counts, create invoices, and enter payments into your accounting systems.
If you’re quickly growing or sell across multiple channels, then tracking down data takes most of your time and many hands to do. If not managed correctly, manually moving data between systems can be costly and counterproductive. That’s why many merchants turn to integrating their accounting system.
In this article, we’ll talk about the benefits of accounting integration and the best way to approach it.
How to Select the Right Multichannel Retail Systems
Selecting the right point solutions to execute your multichannel retail strategy is difficult. You must evaluate eCommerce platforms, enterprise resource platforms (ERP), and point of sale (POS) systems. And, it’s complicated to figure out which ones will work together to support your multichannel business processes.
For example, if you want to list different pricing for your B2C website versus your B2B website, does your ERP support that? How about your eCommerce system? More importantly, how will those systems communicate to make sure each has the right price displayed?
Many vendors do not build software that supports the key requirements to building a multichannel business. They built their software in the last decade (or sometimes the last century!) and are trying to milk every dollar they can from it. Some are not interested, others are incapable of making their systems multichannel-ready. You, the multichannel retailer, will feel the weight of that this problem.
But it doesn’t have to be that way! (more…)
Omnichannel is a buzzword. Multichannel is a strategy.
Have you heard that omnichannel is the future of retail? Do you read case studies and blog posts about being everywhere for your customers, all the time? Maybe you’ve even seen that omnichannel is the next evolution of multichannel.
I’m here to tell you that you’ve been misled!
Four Essential Strategies for Increasing eCommerce Sales
image via Quartsoft.com
Consistency, convenience, product availability and price are key drivers luring shoppers out of brick and mortar stores into the world of eCommerce. Lackluster store displays, picked over merchandise and poor customer service, are just a few reasons turning shoppers away. Forbes recently reported that during the 2013 holiday shopping season, U.S. retailers received approximately half the holiday foot traffic they experienced just three years ago. And concern trickles down as large retailers like Best Buy and JCPenney close stores. Many reasons are cited for the closings, but two reasons stand-out as lessons to be learned.
