With Christmas edging closer, timely research just released by ChannelGrabber, the leading software provider of multichannel eCommerce software reveals that 65% of micro, small and medium-sized online retailers are losing significant revenues due to avoidable inefficiencies in stock management.
Retailers were asked what do you see as the greatest challenge as a multi-channel seller and 65% highlighted inventory and stock management whilst 13% said that product listings were top of their list.
A further 10% said billing, with order management and shipping coming in at 8% and 4% respectively.
Unsurprisingly, between 80 and 90% of these retailers sell both through Amazon and eBay (with Etsy a distant third at 30%) and almost half also had their own company webstore.
Inventory management is so important to retailers’ business because it’s their biggest single asset and consumer of cash. Buying in the wrong stock results in products being tied up longer or worse price cuts, reduced profits or losses. Meanwhile buying too much stock is a drain on retailers’ financial resources.
Multi-channel selling (selling through multiple on- and offline stores) presents its own unique challenges. For example, exposing all of your stock on every sales channel risks overselling and damaging negative feedback from disappointed customers whilst splitting stock across sales channels exposes us you to losing larger orders as it looks like you can’t fulfil them.
Whether you are selling on the high street, through a webstore, through an online marketplace like Amazon or eBay, on or all of the above, properly managing inventory across all of your sales channels can, it seems be the key to your success or the cause of your failure.
The solution is to view your inventory as one and make it available to all through every channel. To do this, however, real-time stock management is needed.
Every time you sell an item, the stock level has to change in every sales channel in real time. This is relatively easy to do if your sales volumes are low, sales are few and far between or if you have only a couple of channels to manage, but as your business grows, these management challenges can become a real headache.
This is where inventory management software comes in. This allows these processes to be automated and managed effectively, allowing eCommerce businesses to focus on their products and customers.
Software such as this is especially important to retailers who want to connect to eBay, Amazon and their webstore whilst making all of their stock available everywhere at once. They typically want to link their inventory together so when a sale is made anywhere, stock levels are updated everywhere. Linking stock by SKU and creating or updating in bulk by CSV or manual uploads without the need for manual entry are desirable and automatically linking product listings based on the SKU thereby enabling them to have their entire inventory listed in every location is a definite plus.
By deploying technology, retailers want, above all to eradicate overselling and never miss out on a sale. But automation also helps to minimise errors, save time and integrate all of their ecommerce activities into one solution. Ultimately they hope to improve customer satisfaction and so achieve higher seller rankings resulting in repeat business and new customer acquisition.
Though inventory management was ranked as the number one concern for these retailers, we shouldn’t forget that many also cited other administrative tasks like product listing, order management, billing, shipping and customer communications as other significant challenges. Once again, these challenges are exacerbated by multi-channel selling because each require retailers to log into multiple, disparate online systems.
Thankfully software developers have come to the rescue because several of the leading inventory management solutions also include features for the management of product listing, order management, billing, shipping and customer communications and draw all of these administrative processes together through a single user interface.
As a consequence, this research concludes that multichannel eCommerce software is seen and welcomed as a means of helping retailers to automate the management of complex ecommerce business processes and freeing up time to focus on the retailers’ priority - keeping inventory off the shelves and into the hands of their customers!
Find out more: www.channelgrabber.com