When you’re an online retailer, one of the many things you learn over time is that organising and managing your inventory and orders takes a lot of time and effort. But you also learn that having a well organised and maintained inventory and order process can save you a lot of precious time. Having an order management software can make this task far more efficient, and here’s how:
Managing your inventory manually makes the potential for human error much higher. Having a software do the dirty work for you can not only save you time and effort, but also reduce worry of making mistakes (and not to mention save you money on stationary!).
Automating the order process can further save you time. By using an inventory management software, you can get live updates on your stock, bulk print your shipping labels (which can literally save you hours per day if you’re a large volume retailer), and automatically email your customers with tracking numbers for their orders. These tasks might take minutes, but those minutes can add up, so automating them can be extremely efficient.
Going back to those live updates on your stock levels and orders – having these in real time can vastly help you keep up to date with your inventory as you’re notified immediately of any changes as it is being updated.
If you’re an ecommerce merchant who sells on more than one marketplace, order management software can really be your best friend. You can sync stock across your sales channels – so if you’re selling on eBay, Amazon and Shopify, when something is sold eBay, the software will automatically update your stock across the other channels. No more overselling!
A good order management software should also be able to help you organize your suppliers – creating and emailing purchase orders to them through the software is handy for keeping track of your stock.
Setting re-order levels with your order management software is also a useful trick. You can tell the software to notify you when a minimum stock quantity is detected so that you can order more, or better yet, have the software automatically order more for you. You should never have to worry about disappointing your customers.
Order management software should also have a sales reporting feature built in so you can have access to all the useful data across your sales channels in one easy-to-read dashboard. These include reports on individual channels and brands so you can identify which stock is making you the most money, and which stock isn’t selling as well.