If you choose to use Lightspeed POS integrated with Lightspeed eCom, youll see that eCom shows a lot of promise, but limitations around the number of SKUs, design templates, and its support for multiple inventories may block you from delivering the experience youre hoping for. You can also filter out which SKUs should be synced and which not, in case you don't want all products to get synced. Shopify, Magento, WooCommerce, BigCommerce) as a base for listing items and selling on digital channels (e.g. You can also collect data from past sales periods. When choosing such a tool, you need to pay attention to a few features that should be key in your decision-making process. Download "eCommerce API Integration for Your Business" and find more about the value and cost of integrating your B2B SaaS system with various shopping platforms! Multichannel selling has become an integral part of the eCommerce business expansion strategy for many merchants. And marketplaces changed the industry all over again. But these challenges arent insurmountable. Irrespective of where customers are, sellers want to be able to reach their potential buyers. Say youre a retailer, and 80% of your daily-sales come from in-store purchases. Amazon, which is one of the most popular marketplaces in the world, and Shopify, one of the top eCommerce platforms up to date, are very popular among online merchants. We made the decision to open up a small office with our fastest movers there to provide an exceptional purchasing experience for our best customers. Usually, B2B SaaS solutions perform inventory synchronization every few minutes or sometimes in real-time. Online store owners build their stores on different eCommerce platforms and usually distribute products on Amazon or eBay. Especially when Sellbery attractive prices are even lower. How do you know when you will run out of stock and when you would need to replenish inventory? The rapid pace of the digital world development has a positive impact on various spheres. We do online shopping every day. Please fill out the form below and well be in touch shortly! For instance, if you want to increase the scarcity of a product, you can display just 2% of your inventory to shoppers i.e. When B2B SaaS companies choose to integrate with eCommerce platforms individually, they will face the following challenges: Instead of integrating with each e-commerce platform separately, a better solution is to use a unified API. The shorter synchronization intervals are, the better. Even hourly order exports to the warehouse can create significant lag problems. Increase your multi-channel sales by synchronizing inventory. Timing can be tricky during periods of high volume sales, as there is often lag between your warehouse/ERP and your orders. As soon as your sync platform recalculates your inventory, factoring in sales made, this information is updated automatically on your linked listings. Further, if an item is out of stock, it needs to be added in time so that the customers do not switch to another site. The service offers the whole scope of functionality that allows you to provide an inventory synchronization feature for online store owners. Accumula is made in Tacoma, WA, USA, How to Do Multi-Channel Inventory Sync in Retail without Adding Complexity, How Accumula Helps You Synchronize Inventory Across Multiple Channels. Customers place orders on any of the platforms youre selling on, like Shopify or eBay, and are imported to your sync platform, which allows for the automatic adjustment of your inventory. Your ecommerce site accounts for order velocity the best, but it doesnt reflect for sales on other platforms. With the advent of the world-famous marketplaces, it is possible to increase brand visibility and enter new markets with little upfront investment. We applied this same approach when opening our UK-based company. Solutions like these help: Although no seller wants to have products laying around, you dont want to find yourself out of stock. For instance, if a particular product recorded high sales during the last Christmas period, the channel will help to remind you, and also manage pre-orders in the coming Christmas period. But how is that possible without the manager been informed about the stock status? You need to track, synchronize and manage all incoming orders across multiple sales channels. With automated inventory updates, online store owners can minimize back orders, prevent customer disappointment, and build trust and confidence with their clients. A solution is a transactional inventory strategy. Warehouse management software is quite similar to the inventory management system. Some products have a longer shelf life while others sell out during the first days of being listed on a website or a marketplace. 
Here is where Sellbery comes to the rescue. Transactional inventory strategies allow for you to push context-based changes to inventory quantities. If your software supports it, you can create inventory buckets to dedicate stock to certain platforms. There are plenty of online marketplaces and platforms that offer us a variety of unique items. With zero effort. Google Shopping is among the TOP online platforms for business integrations. These may be raw materials, parts, and everything in between. With a delta strategy, you push the new inventory quantity to all 3 channels. Just remember that such a tool should keep working even when your business hours are over, becoming one of your competitive advantages. Accumula. It is responsible for maintaining an optimal amount of resources in all the stores. Now sellers can go multichannel which helps not to be bound to a vicinity and market products to millions of shoppers. No matter how inventory changes in one place, it should always be synced with the other, and corresponding counts should coincide. If you stock high-speed items, you need a system that syncs quickly.There are times when as little as five minutes delay could lead to overselling, and this can be disastrous, particularly on eBay, in terms of your ratings as a seller. One of the problems is the data synchronization between different channels. When an order is placed on the store you get notified about the order via webhook for. Now you are ready to sell your Shopify products on Amazon while tracking orders and inventory between the eCommerce platform and marketplace. Even with the high level of technology development and the availability of various inventory management tools, you would be surprised how many sellers still do everything manually. It is a diverse platform where every product has its own properties viz, size, color, price, etc. Today, retail businesses are all about hybrid and multi-channel, have tougher competition, and have customers everywhere, from social media to marketplaces. And here is where a multichannel listing platform comes to the rescue.
However, you ought to ensure that you can quickly access more products to meet demand. The implication is that some sellers may sell on several platforms, but are unable to accurately see the stock they have in real time across all marketplaces. Using eBay as an example, heres how you can fix inventory rules for a particular channel: There are several inventory syncing platforms that let you play with this in so many ways: Through this feature, you can limit your display to a percentage of your available stock. there are 5 in stock of a particular unit) are a blunt instrument for controlling inventory; they can work, but they lack important nuance. This allows us to provide you with synchronization of those tools in a highly customizable way that'll fit your business. As a multi-channel seller, you need to keep track of your inventory across all your products and sales channels. They provide real time multi-platform sales management. How 100% Inventory Availability Can Help You Maximize Sales, BOPIS in Retail: How to Create an In-Store Pickup Experience Rivaling the Big Brands, How to Do Multi Channel Inventory Management with One Simple Integration. Forever Free 99 SKU Plan the best offer on the market. And what happens if during the holidays things get too busy and no-one updates the inventory for a few days in a row? When you accomplish the previous steps, you need to connect Shopify with Amazon in Sellbery, making the first one an export point and the second one an import point. That doesn't work. Talk about a modern day nightmare for small business owners! Here is what you need to look out for in an inventory management tool: Besides offering you all of the above features, Sellbery provides you with additional tools which help track sellers performance on various sales channels as well as set up and manage Google Shopping Campaigns. However, integrating with every eCommerce platform manually is difficult. This allows your retail team to work on managing orders effectively, instead of getting distracted by an unfamiliar platform, or having to do any sort of manual intervention. To support a transactional strategy, your software must track inventory changes in coded transactions. After every sale, all his sales channels would synchronize automatically and show only the current stock available for sale. Published 7 June 2019 | Updated 30 June 2022 | Khrystyna Oliinyk. Owning and managing multiple sales channels used to be a huge problem that only the big corporations could handle. If a retailer receives say, six online orders, those orders need to be reflected in the POS. We support unlimited warehouses, unlimited subsets (buckets), transactional inventory, and delta tracking. Customers will certainly not be happy to receive their orders after one whole month versus promised quick delivery. Ill talk more about this feature and how you can use it to your advantage below. A distributed truth solution, such as Accumula, works night and day behind-the-scenes to give you truth across the different eCommerce and in-store systems used within your retail business.
In this case, you might think: I only get ten online orders a day. This becomes especially true when you have low levels of inventory for certain SKUs. social media, Amazon, eBay) because these solutions tend to integrate with online marketplaces out-of-the-box, or with the help of plugins (e.g. When you use Accumula to automate and streamline channel syncing in real-time, you also unlock the following benefits: In short, Accumula removes all friction in the multi-channel sync by connecting your chosen POS, eCommerce, and fulfillment solutions. Customers place orders on one of the channels online store owners are selling on, like Shopify or eBay. Bypass the issues and limitations that come with vertically integrated systems. Moreover, overselling contradicts with the policy of the top marketplaces like Amazon, Walmart, Rakuten USA, etc., and they may even ban you from selling products on their platform. Both Shopify and Lightspeed are fantastic within their respective wheelhouses (i.e. Moreover, they collaborate with diverse suppliers. In contrast, a distributed truth system (such as Accumula), acts as an in-real-time bridge between your eCommerce business and your in-store POS solution no matter which platform you choose to work in at any given time. If all 3 listings sell in between your inventory sync schedule, youve just created 2 unhappy customers. Multichannel selling is associated with many challenges that should be tackled at the very beginning. Whether youre syncing inventory to one ecommerce platform or many, youre going to encounter challenges. When sellers track inventory in a spreadsheet, there is no brainer that some products are forgotten about and they lie around for a very long time. If you have just started selling on Amazon, you may have already heard of Amazon Repricer, and many of its success stories helping sellers to win the buy box on the Amazon marketplace. Brands that operate with online and brick-and-mortar stores usually have at least three different systems running at all times, for example: And there may also be warehousing systems and third-party logistics (3PL) tools in play, too. Currently we have connectors to Shopify , Square , BigCommerce , WooCommerce , Shopware and QuickBooks . This would enable the seller to get the most conversions without risking overselling. Alert you to low inventory levels, allowing you maintain stock levels. For example, API2Cart provides integration with 40+ shopping carts and marketplaces at once. At Accumula, we believe the only way to meet those expectations is by using the best-in-class solutions for the jobs they were built to do. Google Analytics has become a goldmine of e-commerce data for online sellers all over the world. In other words, the only way to meet the demands of multi-channel commerce is through continuous synchronization between systems. Here, we've created a comprehensive post that goes into detail on how you can overcome the obstacles of multi-channel inventory synchronization. Today, customers shop across multiple channels: in-store, on your site using tablets and phones, and on Facebook, Amazon and eBay. You could even items with zero inventory. Did you know that multichannel retailing brings billions of dollars to sellers every day? Its time to implement a multichannel strategy and start selling on Amazon, eBay, Etsy, and 15 more marketplaces, social media platforms, and shopping carts. Max is the co-founder and CMO of CrazyLister, the worlds leading eBay listing software, used with love by 100,000 retailers. With the help of inventory data, it is easy to make data-driven decisions regarding your stock and promotion activities. After that, you will need to download your Shopify products to Sellbery and upload them to Amazon. product updates and other useful material. One of the greatest features of WMS is the ability to monitor and control inventory across several channels. If this seller had auto stock sync, he would be able to display all 10 devices on all of his platforms. How can I efficiently and successfully manage multi-channel sales inventory across all the channels? Once the products are matched, there are two basic ways of how to perform sync: mirroring and adjustment sync. When it's done right, multi-channel inventory synchronization allows retailers to build strong relationships effortlessly with their customers, by: But that isn't all. Note that it doesn't mean that those counts are the same: we just track what changes are made and reflect them to both service. If the warehouse received a new shipment from the supplier and performed a transaction to add 100 units to the available stock, that transaction can be disseminated to an OMS, and further disseminated to your sales channels. When you correctly manage your inventory, you can, Improper inventory tracking could lead to more demand than supply, which might cause you to increase your prices or end up having to buy from more costly suppliers to meet demand. Find out more in our Privacy Policy, I agree to be contacted by email and receive the requested content. One more example is a retailer who also has a store and wishes to keep some stock for offline operations. It supports integration with these and many other marketplaces eommerce platforms. As a merchant, you need to avoid having such situations at any cost low-in-demand inventory increases your spending on warehousing thus decreasing your revenue. For example, a seller who may only have 15 units might list: If you use multi-platform stock management solutions, youll be notified when youre running low on stock. API2Cart will use the information you provide Warehouse management software is quite similar to the inventory management system though it has some more perks. Have all your relevant orders pop-up in the right place, in real-time. Another answer is to have someone in your existing retail team do it, which is still expensive and takes away from customer service. That inventory quickly becomes stale, which in turn leads to over-sales and a dreadful customer experience. Ecommerce software stacks often involve lots of players, and you need to determine which inventory system is the most accurate. For instance, online shoe retailers might show that they still have five leather boots in stock on Shopify and on eBay, but in real time these items may have been sold offline. If you want to scale your, business you have to incorporate these solutions to your work process. Simply add a tag to your products in your POS, and data about that product will be distributed across all systems through automation. When considering your strategies for inventory syncs, you need to consider your sources of truth. Raw numbers (e.g. So, such a tool should allow you to not only manage inventory on a single sales channel but synchronize inventory across all of them. In 2013, we realized the majority of our sales were going to the United Kingdom, specifically,London. Etsy is unlike many marketplaces as it is designed for handmade goods and vintage things. On periods like Black Friday or Cyber Monday, consider turning off your inventory syncs altogether, since the order-export lag can easily lead to overselling. Note that in this case, if initially, the quantities are different, they need to be synced from one tool to another in order to avoid losing any actual important data. Automation also removes the possibility of any human errors.
, and youll see why Accumula is the best choice for multi-channel inventory synchronization whether you're a small, mid-market, or enterprise-sized retailer. Marketplaces shape the state of the modern e-commerce market. Very often sellers start their eCommerce business by opening an online store with Shopify and later on adding Amazon as the second sales channel. It does not take a lot of time and once you finish the setup process, you are ready to sell. Automate ordering and fulfillment processes. Short synching intervals you need to keep all data up-to-date and waiting for hours for a tool to synchronize inventory is not a way to do that. Id like to begin by sharing a true story of a seller who has 10 laptops in stock and markets them on 3 different channels: Because he does not have automated stock sync, he allocates 2 laptops to Amazon, 3 laptops to eBay, and the remaining 5 to his personal web store. ERP solutions also allow merchants to automatically synchronize stock levels and keep inventory accurate and up-to-date on multiple channels. Contact Us, Call Us 1-800-224-0976 or write manager@api2cart.com. Moreover, it is time-consuming and expensive too. Free & Easy connection to Google Merchant for an unlimited product upload to start Google Smart Shopping Campaigns. Here is how the process of stock sync works: With the help of such B2B SaaS solutions, retailers can monitor regular sales and be aware of what items are needed to refill the stock. This information is a part of the inventory synchronization process itself. What Types of Records are Usually Synced? Ignoring this important aspect of eCommerce business operations can hurt your income. One of the pitfalls of inventory syncs is that youre pushing and pulling raw numbers of available units. 1) 29% of sellers lack visibility on multiple platforms, and are unable to reliably provide fulfillment of promises. The good news is that Orderwave has enough features to support the strategies outlined in this article. The end result is that customers can order items that are no longer in stock. But retailers who combine both online and brick-and-mortar stores have it harder. This feature lets you add the maximum amount to be showed on a particular channel. Within a short period, our pace increased and included a showroom, a move that paid off and subsequently helped to grow our business hugely. Moreover, you will be able to get, add, update, delete information on orders, products, customers, shipments, categories, etc. For example, if 5 items of some product were sold in your online store, than those 5 items need to be subtracted from the availability count in Square. The more platforms youre on, the more likely that youll oversell. Everyone from small businesses to multinationals is trying their best to keep up with the trends. These days, theres a lot of pressure on sellers to be everywhere, as a result of eCommerce marketplace expansion, from Amazon and eBay to other marketplaces like Rakuten, AliExpress, Walmart, and more. To account for this, and make the syncs as timely as possible, another strategy is to push deltas (or changes) to each channel. Subscribe to our blog for the latest in product updates and industry trends. The sellers need to constantly divide attention between these marketplaces, manually track orders and make changes in the spreadsheet. 2) Annually, $1.1 trillion is lost in revenue as a result of overselling or out-of-stock issues. These are just a few benefits you will enjoy with Sellbery. This works if you dont want to discourage people from purchasing when youre out of stock. Continuing with the example of the shoe retail store, the customer would have to wait 34 days (30 days shipment period from China and the 4 days itll take you to ship to the customer) before getting his or her shoes, without any other setbacks. How to Sync Two Office 365 or Exchange Calendars? Getting multi-channel inventory sync right also allows retailers to: But to gain these key advantages, retailers first need to have all of their digital channels aligned in real-time with in-store and warehouse stock levels. As a seller, if you select the wrong syncing platform for the quantity and speed that you handle regularly, youll eventually pay a heavy price in terms of bad buyer feedback if you need to delay shipment as a result poor inventory synchronization. Keeping track of inventory helps you estimate how products are selling and which products are not popular among your customers. You can read more about the process in our. But for this to work, you need systems that talk to each other. Thats why sellers who sell on multiple channels keep less stock on hand and list more than the actual products they have available.
In general, the process is the same for all other marketplaces and online stores. When new stock is received, you can transfer inventory from your main bucket to the buckets youve dedicated to the sales channels. If you have an OMS, you can craft the best strategy, because your OMS can receive syncs from the warehouse, and account for orders placed on all sales channels. Before you go, download the guide on how to integrate with 40+ eCommerce platforms in less than a month! Copyright Sellbery 2021-2022. However, complexity grows as your business grows. A way to manage this complexity is to go for the all-in-one kind of software, paying attention to their online reviews before you make a decision. What's more when multiple platforms are under consideration, it turns out to be quite challenging. These systems are capable of keeping track of items being sold out in the inventory across all online stores. And if you have one person who knows how to manage it all, thats a huge danger in an industry with a high staff turnover. Synchronization of shipment and refund data between marketplaces and stores. All of the above makes inventory management vital for any up and growing eCommerce business as its lack may jeopardize all your other efforts. With Accumula, multi-channel inventory sync is effortless. Most of the modern online shops, ERP and eCommerce systems, or other business apps have this feature built-in. In that case, dropshipping software comes in handy, which solves a lot of issues associated with dropshipping, including synchronization of inventory. So, put simply, manual intervention is not scalable or consistent. For instance, if you have 100 iPhones, but want to sell fifty to family and friends, you would only display 50% of your inventory. [End-of-Season Sale], How to Sell on MercadoLibre: Step-by-Step Guide for Online Sellers, How to Start a Multichannel Retailing Business: Prerequisites & Main Steps, Inventory Reports: Importance, Benefits & Main Types, How to Sell on Google Shopping: Best Practices, The Common Misconception of Amazon Repricer Among Amazon Sellers, Inventory management helps eCommerce companies to keep track of inventory and avoid overselling, Sellers can better organize products in categories, Items that sell well do not run out of stock as eCommerce business managers control inventory 24/7 and have time to order new batches of goods, Inventory management clearly displays which products sell well during specific time periods and which are better suited for other times or even sales channels, Keeping track of inventory increases product visibility for online merchants. In fact, we may spend quite a lot of time while looking for some special goods. As a result, you need to deal with refunds. Two common solutions for this problem are: But these are less than ideal for retailers who are managing online and offline channels at the same time. Nobody has to be trained to use a piece of software theyre not familiar with. For online-only retailers, this can often be done using their eCommerce platform (e.g. I made a lot of mistakes while developing an online eCommerce business to an annual turnover of five million dollars. The manual workflow breaks down and soon gets out of control. Selling on a single platform is challenging enough. The orders are 'imported' to the B2B SaaS system, which automatically adjusts inventory. According to research by Harvard Business Review, retailers can lose nearly half of intended purchases when customers are faced with stock-outs. This is particularly useful to a seller who is an exclusive distributor of a unique product. For online store owners, whether large or small, it is impossible to manage all this information and stock status in an inventory manually. Online stores allowed for customers to shop from anywhere in the world without leaving the comfort of their own home. Fortunately for companies that face the problem of inventory management, there are tools that help them eliminate the problem. Every integration is a complicated process and requires an expert for flawless accomplishment. Keep in mind that you can always manually modify quantities for any reason, like offline sales. When a customer purchases an item, such a system instantly changes the inventory count. Deliverr joins Shopify Building the worlds most merchant-centric logistics solution. Since you are only syncing deltas, your inventory sync process is likely very fast, since it is only syncing the SKUs where the quantities changed, which is likely to be a small number of SKUs. Inspire impulse, delight-filled purchases by, Increase choice and cut shipping times by making retail inventory available both from your stores, A second system where they hold their store inventory and process in-store purchases, such as a POS system like, A third system where they manage order shipments, such as, A single/central source of truth system, or. By using this site you agree to these cookies being set. Retailing has been steadily developing for many years but the real revolution happened with the advent of the internet. Not all ecommerce platforms support transactional inventory strategies. Orders management is also a part of inventory synchronization process which helps to avoid discrepancies and overselling. Your staff will be able to handle the hectic busier periods of the year while keeping 100% inventory accuracy across systems at all times. There is no correct answer; it all depends on what makes the most sense for each platform. Keeping inventory levels accurate across multichannel platforms can be challenging. Avoid wasting time and harming profits by having to constantly re-train or hire new staff. Here is where inventory synchronization between all online stores holds significance. Data is quickly synchronized across all sales channels. This simplicity and choice on the customer side has become second-nature, but it means huge operational challenges on the retailers side. They attract users with millions of monthly users, the promise of increased revenue and ease of use. I can unsubscribe at any time. Every seller needs to adopt an inventory management platform and make it an integral part of eCommerce business management. The products can be matched by names, custom IDs, or in any other way. If youre selling on multiple channels, or are simply running into inventory syncing issues due to timing, contact us today to get your inventory processes on track. accumula.com 2022, All rights reserved. Real-time contact sync with duplicate matching and historical data merge, Never double-book or miss a meeting with modern and customizable sync, Sync your work tasks, use custom fields, filters, and custom rules.
on the Shopify App Store). When you are just making the first steps to multichannel selling, the road might seem bright and sunny. Analytics is a full-proof way to learn what your customers really need instead of guessing what they might need. As a retailer, the last thing you want is to wait until the end of the day when a customer has placed a BOPIS (buy online, pick up in-store) order before realizing that the item is out of stock in the location they're picking it up from. In this article, we uncover the main challenges every multichannel seller needs to address and discuss why multichannel inventory management software should become an integral part of your daily eCommerce operations.
Here is where Sellbery comes to the rescue. Transactional inventory strategies allow for you to push context-based changes to inventory quantities. If your software supports it, you can create inventory buckets to dedicate stock to certain platforms. There are plenty of online marketplaces and platforms that offer us a variety of unique items. With zero effort. Google Shopping is among the TOP online platforms for business integrations. These may be raw materials, parts, and everything in between. With a delta strategy, you push the new inventory quantity to all 3 channels. Just remember that such a tool should keep working even when your business hours are over, becoming one of your competitive advantages. Accumula. It is responsible for maintaining an optimal amount of resources in all the stores. Now sellers can go multichannel which helps not to be bound to a vicinity and market products to millions of shoppers. No matter how inventory changes in one place, it should always be synced with the other, and corresponding counts should coincide. If you stock high-speed items, you need a system that syncs quickly.There are times when as little as five minutes delay could lead to overselling, and this can be disastrous, particularly on eBay, in terms of your ratings as a seller. One of the problems is the data synchronization between different channels. When an order is placed on the store you get notified about the order via webhook for. Now you are ready to sell your Shopify products on Amazon while tracking orders and inventory between the eCommerce platform and marketplace. Even with the high level of technology development and the availability of various inventory management tools, you would be surprised how many sellers still do everything manually. It is a diverse platform where every product has its own properties viz, size, color, price, etc. Today, retail businesses are all about hybrid and multi-channel, have tougher competition, and have customers everywhere, from social media to marketplaces. And here is where a multichannel listing platform comes to the rescue. However, you ought to ensure that you can quickly access more products to meet demand. The implication is that some sellers may sell on several platforms, but are unable to accurately see the stock they have in real time across all marketplaces. Using eBay as an example, heres how you can fix inventory rules for a particular channel: There are several inventory syncing platforms that let you play with this in so many ways: Through this feature, you can limit your display to a percentage of your available stock. there are 5 in stock of a particular unit) are a blunt instrument for controlling inventory; they can work, but they lack important nuance. This allows us to provide you with synchronization of those tools in a highly customizable way that'll fit your business. As a multi-channel seller, you need to keep track of your inventory across all your products and sales channels. They provide real time multi-platform sales management. How 100% Inventory Availability Can Help You Maximize Sales, BOPIS in Retail: How to Create an In-Store Pickup Experience Rivaling the Big Brands, How to Do Multi Channel Inventory Management with One Simple Integration. Forever Free 99 SKU Plan the best offer on the market. And what happens if during the holidays things get too busy and no-one updates the inventory for a few days in a row? When you accomplish the previous steps, you need to connect Shopify with Amazon in Sellbery, making the first one an export point and the second one an import point. That doesn't work. Talk about a modern day nightmare for small business owners! Here is what you need to look out for in an inventory management tool: Besides offering you all of the above features, Sellbery provides you with additional tools which help track sellers performance on various sales channels as well as set up and manage Google Shopping Campaigns. However, integrating with every eCommerce platform manually is difficult. This allows your retail team to work on managing orders effectively, instead of getting distracted by an unfamiliar platform, or having to do any sort of manual intervention. To support a transactional strategy, your software must track inventory changes in coded transactions. After every sale, all his sales channels would synchronize automatically and show only the current stock available for sale. Published 7 June 2019 | Updated 30 June 2022 | Khrystyna Oliinyk. Owning and managing multiple sales channels used to be a huge problem that only the big corporations could handle. If a retailer receives say, six online orders, those orders need to be reflected in the POS. We support unlimited warehouses, unlimited subsets (buckets), transactional inventory, and delta tracking. Customers will certainly not be happy to receive their orders after one whole month versus promised quick delivery. Ill talk more about this feature and how you can use it to your advantage below. A distributed truth solution, such as Accumula, works night and day behind-the-scenes to give you truth across the different eCommerce and in-store systems used within your retail business.
In this case, you might think: I only get ten online orders a day. This becomes especially true when you have low levels of inventory for certain SKUs. social media, Amazon, eBay) because these solutions tend to integrate with online marketplaces out-of-the-box, or with the help of plugins (e.g. When you use Accumula to automate and streamline channel syncing in real-time, you also unlock the following benefits: In short, Accumula removes all friction in the multi-channel sync by connecting your chosen POS, eCommerce, and fulfillment solutions. Customers place orders on one of the channels online store owners are selling on, like Shopify or eBay. Bypass the issues and limitations that come with vertically integrated systems. Moreover, overselling contradicts with the policy of the top marketplaces like Amazon, Walmart, Rakuten USA, etc., and they may even ban you from selling products on their platform. Both Shopify and Lightspeed are fantastic within their respective wheelhouses (i.e. Moreover, they collaborate with diverse suppliers. In contrast, a distributed truth system (such as Accumula), acts as an in-real-time bridge between your eCommerce business and your in-store POS solution no matter which platform you choose to work in at any given time. If all 3 listings sell in between your inventory sync schedule, youve just created 2 unhappy customers. Multichannel selling is associated with many challenges that should be tackled at the very beginning. Whether youre syncing inventory to one ecommerce platform or many, youre going to encounter challenges. When sellers track inventory in a spreadsheet, there is no brainer that some products are forgotten about and they lie around for a very long time. If you have just started selling on Amazon, you may have already heard of Amazon Repricer, and many of its success stories helping sellers to win the buy box on the Amazon marketplace. Brands that operate with online and brick-and-mortar stores usually have at least three different systems running at all times, for example: And there may also be warehousing systems and third-party logistics (3PL) tools in play, too. Currently we have connectors to Shopify , Square , BigCommerce , WooCommerce , Shopware and QuickBooks . This would enable the seller to get the most conversions without risking overselling. Alert you to low inventory levels, allowing you maintain stock levels. For example, API2Cart provides integration with 40+ shopping carts and marketplaces at once. At Accumula, we believe the only way to meet those expectations is by using the best-in-class solutions for the jobs they were built to do. Google Analytics has become a goldmine of e-commerce data for online sellers all over the world. In other words, the only way to meet the demands of multi-channel commerce is through continuous synchronization between systems. Here, we've created a comprehensive post that goes into detail on how you can overcome the obstacles of multi-channel inventory synchronization. Today, customers shop across multiple channels: in-store, on your site using tablets and phones, and on Facebook, Amazon and eBay. You could even items with zero inventory. Did you know that multichannel retailing brings billions of dollars to sellers every day? Its time to implement a multichannel strategy and start selling on Amazon, eBay, Etsy, and 15 more marketplaces, social media platforms, and shopping carts. Max is the co-founder and CMO of CrazyLister, the worlds leading eBay listing software, used with love by 100,000 retailers. With the help of inventory data, it is easy to make data-driven decisions regarding your stock and promotion activities. After that, you will need to download your Shopify products to Sellbery and upload them to Amazon. product updates and other useful material. One of the greatest features of WMS is the ability to monitor and control inventory across several channels. If this seller had auto stock sync, he would be able to display all 10 devices on all of his platforms. How can I efficiently and successfully manage multi-channel sales inventory across all the channels? Once the products are matched, there are two basic ways of how to perform sync: mirroring and adjustment sync. When it's done right, multi-channel inventory synchronization allows retailers to build strong relationships effortlessly with their customers, by: But that isn't all. Note that it doesn't mean that those counts are the same: we just track what changes are made and reflect them to both service. If the warehouse received a new shipment from the supplier and performed a transaction to add 100 units to the available stock, that transaction can be disseminated to an OMS, and further disseminated to your sales channels. When you correctly manage your inventory, you can, Improper inventory tracking could lead to more demand than supply, which might cause you to increase your prices or end up having to buy from more costly suppliers to meet demand. Find out more in our Privacy Policy, I agree to be contacted by email and receive the requested content. One more example is a retailer who also has a store and wishes to keep some stock for offline operations. It supports integration with these and many other marketplaces eommerce platforms. As a merchant, you need to avoid having such situations at any cost low-in-demand inventory increases your spending on warehousing thus decreasing your revenue. For example, a seller who may only have 15 units might list: If you use multi-platform stock management solutions, youll be notified when youre running low on stock. API2Cart will use the information you provide Warehouse management software is quite similar to the inventory management system though it has some more perks. Have all your relevant orders pop-up in the right place, in real-time. Another answer is to have someone in your existing retail team do it, which is still expensive and takes away from customer service. That inventory quickly becomes stale, which in turn leads to over-sales and a dreadful customer experience. Ecommerce software stacks often involve lots of players, and you need to determine which inventory system is the most accurate. For instance, online shoe retailers might show that they still have five leather boots in stock on Shopify and on eBay, but in real time these items may have been sold offline. If you want to scale your, business you have to incorporate these solutions to your work process. Simply add a tag to your products in your POS, and data about that product will be distributed across all systems through automation. When considering your strategies for inventory syncs, you need to consider your sources of truth. Raw numbers (e.g. So, such a tool should allow you to not only manage inventory on a single sales channel but synchronize inventory across all of them. In 2013, we realized the majority of our sales were going to the United Kingdom, specifically,London. Etsy is unlike many marketplaces as it is designed for handmade goods and vintage things. On periods like Black Friday or Cyber Monday, consider turning off your inventory syncs altogether, since the order-export lag can easily lead to overselling. Note that in this case, if initially, the quantities are different, they need to be synced from one tool to another in order to avoid losing any actual important data. Automation also removes the possibility of any human errors.
, and youll see why Accumula is the best choice for multi-channel inventory synchronization whether you're a small, mid-market, or enterprise-sized retailer. Marketplaces shape the state of the modern e-commerce market. Very often sellers start their eCommerce business by opening an online store with Shopify and later on adding Amazon as the second sales channel. It does not take a lot of time and once you finish the setup process, you are ready to sell. Automate ordering and fulfillment processes. Short synching intervals you need to keep all data up-to-date and waiting for hours for a tool to synchronize inventory is not a way to do that. Id like to begin by sharing a true story of a seller who has 10 laptops in stock and markets them on 3 different channels: Because he does not have automated stock sync, he allocates 2 laptops to Amazon, 3 laptops to eBay, and the remaining 5 to his personal web store. ERP solutions also allow merchants to automatically synchronize stock levels and keep inventory accurate and up-to-date on multiple channels. Contact Us, Call Us 1-800-224-0976 or write manager@api2cart.com. Moreover, it is time-consuming and expensive too. Free & Easy connection to Google Merchant for an unlimited product upload to start Google Smart Shopping Campaigns. Here is how the process of stock sync works: With the help of such B2B SaaS solutions, retailers can monitor regular sales and be aware of what items are needed to refill the stock. This information is a part of the inventory synchronization process itself. What Types of Records are Usually Synced? Ignoring this important aspect of eCommerce business operations can hurt your income. One of the pitfalls of inventory syncs is that youre pushing and pulling raw numbers of available units. 1) 29% of sellers lack visibility on multiple platforms, and are unable to reliably provide fulfillment of promises. The good news is that Orderwave has enough features to support the strategies outlined in this article. The end result is that customers can order items that are no longer in stock. But retailers who combine both online and brick-and-mortar stores have it harder. This feature lets you add the maximum amount to be showed on a particular channel. Within a short period, our pace increased and included a showroom, a move that paid off and subsequently helped to grow our business hugely. Moreover, you will be able to get, add, update, delete information on orders, products, customers, shipments, categories, etc. For example, if 5 items of some product were sold in your online store, than those 5 items need to be subtracted from the availability count in Square. The more platforms youre on, the more likely that youll oversell. Everyone from small businesses to multinationals is trying their best to keep up with the trends. These days, theres a lot of pressure on sellers to be everywhere, as a result of eCommerce marketplace expansion, from Amazon and eBay to other marketplaces like Rakuten, AliExpress, Walmart, and more. To account for this, and make the syncs as timely as possible, another strategy is to push deltas (or changes) to each channel. Subscribe to our blog for the latest in product updates and industry trends. The sellers need to constantly divide attention between these marketplaces, manually track orders and make changes in the spreadsheet. 2) Annually, $1.1 trillion is lost in revenue as a result of overselling or out-of-stock issues. These are just a few benefits you will enjoy with Sellbery. This works if you dont want to discourage people from purchasing when youre out of stock. Continuing with the example of the shoe retail store, the customer would have to wait 34 days (30 days shipment period from China and the 4 days itll take you to ship to the customer) before getting his or her shoes, without any other setbacks. How to Sync Two Office 365 or Exchange Calendars? Getting multi-channel inventory sync right also allows retailers to: But to gain these key advantages, retailers first need to have all of their digital channels aligned in real-time with in-store and warehouse stock levels. As a seller, if you select the wrong syncing platform for the quantity and speed that you handle regularly, youll eventually pay a heavy price in terms of bad buyer feedback if you need to delay shipment as a result poor inventory synchronization. Keeping track of inventory helps you estimate how products are selling and which products are not popular among your customers. You can read more about the process in our. But for this to work, you need systems that talk to each other. Thats why sellers who sell on multiple channels keep less stock on hand and list more than the actual products they have available.
In general, the process is the same for all other marketplaces and online stores. When new stock is received, you can transfer inventory from your main bucket to the buckets youve dedicated to the sales channels. If you have an OMS, you can craft the best strategy, because your OMS can receive syncs from the warehouse, and account for orders placed on all sales channels. Before you go, download the guide on how to integrate with 40+ eCommerce platforms in less than a month! Copyright Sellbery 2021-2022. However, complexity grows as your business grows. A way to manage this complexity is to go for the all-in-one kind of software, paying attention to their online reviews before you make a decision. What's more when multiple platforms are under consideration, it turns out to be quite challenging. These systems are capable of keeping track of items being sold out in the inventory across all online stores. And if you have one person who knows how to manage it all, thats a huge danger in an industry with a high staff turnover. Synchronization of shipment and refund data between marketplaces and stores. All of the above makes inventory management vital for any up and growing eCommerce business as its lack may jeopardize all your other efforts. With Accumula, multi-channel inventory sync is effortless. Most of the modern online shops, ERP and eCommerce systems, or other business apps have this feature built-in. In that case, dropshipping software comes in handy, which solves a lot of issues associated with dropshipping, including synchronization of inventory. So, put simply, manual intervention is not scalable or consistent. For instance, if you have 100 iPhones, but want to sell fifty to family and friends, you would only display 50% of your inventory. [End-of-Season Sale], How to Sell on MercadoLibre: Step-by-Step Guide for Online Sellers, How to Start a Multichannel Retailing Business: Prerequisites & Main Steps, Inventory Reports: Importance, Benefits & Main Types, How to Sell on Google Shopping: Best Practices, The Common Misconception of Amazon Repricer Among Amazon Sellers, Inventory management helps eCommerce companies to keep track of inventory and avoid overselling, Sellers can better organize products in categories, Items that sell well do not run out of stock as eCommerce business managers control inventory 24/7 and have time to order new batches of goods, Inventory management clearly displays which products sell well during specific time periods and which are better suited for other times or even sales channels, Keeping track of inventory increases product visibility for online merchants. In fact, we may spend quite a lot of time while looking for some special goods. As a result, you need to deal with refunds. Two common solutions for this problem are: But these are less than ideal for retailers who are managing online and offline channels at the same time. Nobody has to be trained to use a piece of software theyre not familiar with. For online-only retailers, this can often be done using their eCommerce platform (e.g. I made a lot of mistakes while developing an online eCommerce business to an annual turnover of five million dollars. The manual workflow breaks down and soon gets out of control. Selling on a single platform is challenging enough. The orders are 'imported' to the B2B SaaS system, which automatically adjusts inventory. According to research by Harvard Business Review, retailers can lose nearly half of intended purchases when customers are faced with stock-outs. This is particularly useful to a seller who is an exclusive distributor of a unique product. For online store owners, whether large or small, it is impossible to manage all this information and stock status in an inventory manually. Online stores allowed for customers to shop from anywhere in the world without leaving the comfort of their own home. Fortunately for companies that face the problem of inventory management, there are tools that help them eliminate the problem. Every integration is a complicated process and requires an expert for flawless accomplishment. Keep in mind that you can always manually modify quantities for any reason, like offline sales. When a customer purchases an item, such a system instantly changes the inventory count. Deliverr joins Shopify Building the worlds most merchant-centric logistics solution. Since you are only syncing deltas, your inventory sync process is likely very fast, since it is only syncing the SKUs where the quantities changed, which is likely to be a small number of SKUs. Inspire impulse, delight-filled purchases by, Increase choice and cut shipping times by making retail inventory available both from your stores, A second system where they hold their store inventory and process in-store purchases, such as a POS system like, A third system where they manage order shipments, such as, A single/central source of truth system, or. By using this site you agree to these cookies being set. Retailing has been steadily developing for many years but the real revolution happened with the advent of the internet. Not all ecommerce platforms support transactional inventory strategies. Orders management is also a part of inventory synchronization process which helps to avoid discrepancies and overselling. Your staff will be able to handle the hectic busier periods of the year while keeping 100% inventory accuracy across systems at all times. There is no correct answer; it all depends on what makes the most sense for each platform. Keeping inventory levels accurate across multichannel platforms can be challenging. Avoid wasting time and harming profits by having to constantly re-train or hire new staff. Here is where inventory synchronization between all online stores holds significance. Data is quickly synchronized across all sales channels. This simplicity and choice on the customer side has become second-nature, but it means huge operational challenges on the retailers side. They attract users with millions of monthly users, the promise of increased revenue and ease of use. I can unsubscribe at any time. Every seller needs to adopt an inventory management platform and make it an integral part of eCommerce business management. The products can be matched by names, custom IDs, or in any other way. If youre selling on multiple channels, or are simply running into inventory syncing issues due to timing, contact us today to get your inventory processes on track. accumula.com 2022, All rights reserved. Real-time contact sync with duplicate matching and historical data merge, Never double-book or miss a meeting with modern and customizable sync, Sync your work tasks, use custom fields, filters, and custom rules.
on the Shopify App Store). When you are just making the first steps to multichannel selling, the road might seem bright and sunny. Analytics is a full-proof way to learn what your customers really need instead of guessing what they might need. As a retailer, the last thing you want is to wait until the end of the day when a customer has placed a BOPIS (buy online, pick up in-store) order before realizing that the item is out of stock in the location they're picking it up from. In this article, we uncover the main challenges every multichannel seller needs to address and discuss why multichannel inventory management software should become an integral part of your daily eCommerce operations.