The System you need to Automate your Retail Business!
November 27, 2019
admin
Amazon I Amazon Product Management I Amazon Products I Amazon Seller I Ebay Product Management I Ebay Seller I Etsy I Etsy Seller I Inventory Management I Invoicing I Listing I Messaging I Multichannel Retail I Order Management I Product Content Optimization I Sales Channels I Shipping I Shopify I Shopify Seller I Stock Management
Most businesses don’t understand the value automation brings to your business. It’s easy to get wrapped up in the little things and to feel stressed, trust me I’ve been there! When I started my first eBay shop while working a 9-5 job, I spent my days burnt out. I spent evenings sending personalized emails to all my customers and individually uploading all products.
I didn’t know much about systems that would help me to automate my business and I also thought they would cost too much for a startup like me. I know a lot of people will think about it the same way as I did but in hindsight spending the money to become an automated business gave me the time to grow my business. The moment you start to find ways to make your free up your time that is when your business will take off and soar! Imagine a day that because you have automated your business you can spend your time learning about how to gain more sales through social media or spending time analyzing your products what sells.Automating your business can be done in many different ways and can be also be vastly differ from business to business. No one goes into the entrepreneurial space expecting it to be easy with no hard work but it’s all about working smarter not harder.
If you are a retail business ChannelGrabber Ltd can help you. Whether your retail business is founded on your own webstore or on a marketplace like Amazon or eBay, the time will come when you will want to expand onto other sales channels to increase your market reach. But with the increased market exposure comes substantially increased administration. In fact retailers typically experience a doubling of their back-office workload by adding just one more sales channel. And as you add more sales channels it can sometimes feel like your running multiple businesses instead of one.
This additional workload comes from a number of administrative tasks ranging from the creation of product content for listing and ads, then there is the preparation and submission of those listings for every product on each and every sales channel. Multiple listings requires retailers to manage their stock across multiple sales channels, process orders, create and distribute invoices, then manage order fulfilment.
Ads and orders naturally solicit customer communication – questions, queries, enquiries, status update requests and sometimes, complaints all have to be handled promptly to ensure high levels of customer satisfaction. But again, all of this communication is flowing through the message boxes of multiple marketplaces and webstores.
But never fear, because help is at hand.
ChannelGrabber automates each and every one of these time consuming processes. But what’s more, ChannelGrabber optimises many of the tasks that actually help retailers reach, win and retain more customers.
PRODUCT CONTENT OPTIMISATION
In order to maximise reach online, a retailer must optimise product content for each sales channel to capitalise on the data structures, available descriptive fields and the means of representing their product pictorially and with video. This is to ensure your products can be easily found and that customers are empowered to make a buying decision in your favour. ChannelGrabber has been designed such that it is aware of the optimal product content format for each channel.
The system enables you to create a master product catalogue for all of your products in which you can define each item with all of the product content and information required for all of your active sales channels. This makes listing to all of those sales channels so much easier later.
When listing products to multiple webstores and marketplaces, its sadly not possible to reuse the same product content. That’s because each sales channel uses different data structures to compile their product databases and catalogues. In practice, this means that retailers have to create new listing content every time they list a product and do so for each and every sales channel. This is hugely time consuming and error-prone.
Some software products are available that attempt to partially solve this problem by copying the listings you’ve already made to Amazon and then pushing them through templates for all of the other sales channels. But this requires you to create your Amazon listings first and then modify the content to meet the requirements of all of those templates every time you want to list to other channels. At ChannelGrabber, we don’t call that a solution. That’s why ChannelGrabber features a unique master product catalogue so you set up your products once and once only then you can list them to any or all of your sales channels with just one click. It couldn’t be faster or easier!
You can create listings for all your channels.
and create the correct categories for your channel.
Once that is done then you can add any listing information and then upload your listings!
INVENTORY MANAGEMENT
Maximising sales across multiple sales channels requires you to expose your inventory through all of them. But unless you can adjust stock levels in real time, you risk overselling and disappointing customers. Split your stock up in virtual silos and you risk missing out on larger orders you could have fulfilled.
You have to view your inventory as one and make it available to all through every channel but to do this you must avoid common inventory control challenges and engage in real-time stock management. 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 sales channels to manage but as your business grows, your stock management challenges can become a real headache. ChannelGrabber solves these problems by providing a single, fully-integrated system with one user interface, and one location from which you can list your stock and manage it across all of your outlets.
That’s because ChannelGrabber integrates seamlessly with your webstore, eBay, Amazon and many other sales channels. It makes all of your stock available everywhere at once and manages your stock levels in every outlet in real time syncronising any changes across them all instantaneously.
MULTI CHANNEL ORDER MANAGEMENT
With multichannel listings and optimised inventory management comes increased sales volumes and more sales means more orders to process. Great news of course but those orders must be processed using the order management tools on each of the marketplaces and webstores where they were generated. So you have to log in to each of them to view your orderbook, process the orders, generate invoices and manage the fulfilment process. The methods for doing this differ for each sales channel so this creates a big daily administrative burden for retailers.
ChannelGrabber makes light work of order management by providing a single, fully-integrated system with one user interface, and one location from which you can view and manage your orders wherever they originated.
That’s because ChannelGrabber integrates seamlessly with your webstore, eBay, Amazon and many other sales channels. It fetches your orders from those channels in real time, allows you to process them individually or in bulk and syncronises any changes you make back to the originating system.
INVOICING
Billing is a crucial part of every sale and it’s tempting to think in those early days as a retailer that all you need to do is take an online payment and leave PayPal to manage the administration. But it’s not long before the lack of a proper invoicing process starts to hurt and the avoidance of administration today causes headaches tomorrow.
The simplest solution that many small business owners employ is to create manual invoices in Excel or Word but sequential numbering, calculation of taxes due and assignment of transactions to the correct accounts quickly becomes challenging. The introduction of accounting software brings with it its own advantages and disadvantages for the small retailer.
In general, small online retail business invoicing methodologies work against them in many ways, including the lack of a professional appearance, facilitating timely payments, and optimising cash flow. All of which are critical to a small business owner because they help sustain and grow results.
ChannelGrabber enable you to customise your invoices using pre-designed templates to give them a personal touch. You can easily setup different invoice templates for each of your trading companies and sales channels such as your own webstore, Amazon and eBay to tailor the look and feel for each channel.
The system also enables you to create invoices as PDFs which you can print or send by email from within the software. Or have the PDF invoice sent automatically to the customer direct, using eBay and Amazon. ChannelGrabber can also save you time by completely automating your VAT receipts and you can also configure your invoices to be created automatically and sent to your customers the moment you dispatch an order.
SHIPPING AND FULFILMENT
The culmination of every sale and arguably the most important step is the prompt picking, packing, dispatch and shipping of the goods to your customer. Apart from the product itself, it’s probably the stage in the process upon which the customer most heavily bases their judgement of your service. Speed and accuracy are critical.
When selling through a single sales channel, the process can be time-consuming and complex but both the time and complexity are multiplied significantly when it comes to handling orders derived from multiple sales channels. Even accessing your orders requires logging in to several different systems each with their own login credentials, workflow and user interface. First there’s the application of shipping rules, label printing and invoicing. Then dispatch confirmation and customer messaging and then the provision of tracking information – for each and every order in every system!
This complexity inhibits your performance, introduces delays and errors and ultimately impacts customer satisfaction which in turn results in poor seller ratings which hurt your seller reputation and put future sales at risk.
ChannelGrabber makes multichannel order fulfilment easy. It connects with your webstore, eBay and Amazon and more enabling you to print courier labels faster than ever before, ship via multiple couriers from one location and reduce your dispatch times. ChannelGrabber allows you to create smart shipping rules so that your most used services are selected by default. Advanced filters allow you to create labels based on any metric you like.
Compatible with Royal Mail OBA, Royal Mail PPI, MyHermes, ParcelForce, Interlink and DPD and many more, ChannelGrabber connects to your account and prints all your labels from a single interface. ChannelGrabber produces your courier labels and when you dispatch an item, it will send the tracking number directly to eBay, Amazon or your webstore without any additional action required.
The system also strengthens your brand and marketing and personalises your customers’ shopping experience with customised invoices and packing slips.
CUSTOMER MESSAGE MANAGEMENT
Online retail customers consistently cite the quality and timeliness of vendor communication as one of the most important components of the customer experience. What is more, message response is referenced time and time again in seller ratings and feedback scores. But lack of response, late replies, duplicated replies or errors in customer or order association plague so many online retail customer relationships.
Picking up, reading and responding to customer messages can be time consuming for vendors when selling through a single sales channel but when you sell through multiple sales channels, the laborious process of logging in to multiple web applications, downloading and refreshing messages, searching through message threads and negotiating character limits become the stuff of nightmares! What is more, if you need to look up customer order or contact histories before taking an action, the process can be very complex indeed involving moving between multiple screens and menus. Imagine if you managed your email or other communications this way. It’s no wonder messages are missed and errors are frequently made.
Most of us have become accustomed to unified messaging with a single piece of software being used to draw on all of our messaging accounts and repositories, displaying them and facilitating interaction and response from a single user interface. So, when so much is at stake, why can’t the same be achieved with ecommerce messaging?
ChannelGrabber is fully integrated with eBay and Amazon messaging systems to read and track messages sent to and from customers. Received messages are automatically linked directly to the customer or order they’re referring to, saving time and eliminating mistakes.
With ChannelGrabber you can easily see all messages awaiting a response and mark messages as resolved when no further action is required. This creates a simple workflow that you, and your staff, can easily follow. Messages can be assigned to team members to track interaction and resolution and improve response times for customers.
After receiving a message, ChannelGrabber automatically searches for and links customers and their orders to the message enabling you to view them with a single click right from the message.
ChannelGrabber is the most powerful multichannel retail software solution available. ChannelGrabber uniquely helps retailers to reach, win and retain more customers. You’re just minutes away from reaping the benefits! To find out more about how ChannelGrabber can help you automate your retail business book a demo with us!