The five signs that tell online retailers to upgrade their business systems

The five signs that tell online retailers to upgrade their business systems

1: You have separate software for order download, warehouse management and accounts?

Online retailers with too many systems are often overpaying for poor performance.

• How do you record, track and process orders? Do you use one system accounts and another to download customer orders from your sales platforms?

• Is the process of taking data from your order processing system and putting it into accounts a time-sucking manual process?

• Do you track stock levels in a completely different system?

When various front- and back-end systems run separately, it can wreak havoc on the processes that are meant to ensure your company is running smoothly. Without accurate data from sales, inventory management may suffer, while not having the latest information from accounting can trigger a ripple effect on everything from marketing budgets to payroll.

APIs don’t work in many cases; they pass some data but not all – that’s probably why the margin your accounts looks so different from the margin you expect from your sales system.

eTail Support is a single comprehensive piece of software that integrates all of your business functions into one database. With one source of information that contains accurate, real-time data, eTail Support allows you to make better decisions more quickly and frees up time to concentrate on the things that you do to grow your business.

2: You can’t manage your business effectively because you don’t know enough about how it is performing.

Do you know EXACTLY how much money you made last week? How long would it take you to find out?

What about other KPIs, like average gross margin per product and average return rate per order?

If you can’t measure the performance of your business at this level, then you can’t take the decisions that you need to take to grow and develop your business.

If you use eTail Support you can get all the data that you need to decide where to invest your cash, you can see each products real margins across multiple orders, understand the profitability of each of your channels and proactively improve your business with upsell and cross-sell opportunities.

3: Your accounts are always late & the gross profit in your accounts is radically different from the gross profit estimated by your sales system.

Often, the first big signs that your company needs comprehensive business management software will come from your accountants. If you rely on a separate accounts system like Xero or QuickBooks and enter your orders in daily batches usings a semi-manual or even fully manual system you can simply never get your accounts right .

Similarly for producing accounts—if it takes ages to consolidate or reconcile your financial information across systems and through spreadsheets, you need a eTail Support. With all of your order data, purchase data and stock records in one system accounts becomes much, much easier. Reconciliations become easier and faster, there is no manual rekeying of data, or reconciling records manually. Your accounting staff will be more productive, and you will have information that you can act on faster.

4: Your sales are erratic and the customer experience that you deliver is not as good as you would like because your warehouse processes are error prone and inefficient.

As any online retailer matures their biggest challenges are usually efficient and accurate warehouse operations and accurate inventory management. Ensuring that the right products are in the right place at the right time is a vital for effective online retail.

Shipping orders in a timely and accurate way is the only way to survive as an online retailer, you just have to be able to do it.

When sales, inventory and accounts data are all in different systems, it can prevent you from running your operation smoothly, in contrast once you are using eTail Support you will have access to up-to-the-minute information. Order shipping will run fast, accurate and smooth, stock re-ordering can be done in plenty of time and your accounts are updated AUTOMATICALLY every time your ship an order or book in stock.

5: You spend too much time worrying about IT issues and way too much money paying for them

One of the biggest downsides of having multiple systems connected via APIs is that IT management can be an expensive, time consuming nightmare.

Get rid of your existing systems and the bills that go with them, replace the whole lot with a single instance of eTail Support from just £100 per week, ALL IN and get the ability to respond to business needs at speed.

With eTail Support APIs and multiple systems are no longer an issue, everything works smoothly and the system is maintained for you.

Summary

Switching for a group of poorly connected systems to a comprehensive Business Management System can improve your business significantly.

It can improve your efficiency in many areas, cutting costs and allowing you to do more with less.

It can improve your understanding of your business and help you make better business decisions.

It can help you to focus your time and effort on whats really important in your business and get away from fire-fighting and admin tasks.

There is only one Comprehensive Business Management system designed exclusively for brands and online retailers.

eTail Support

Contact Details

Learn more about our system at https://www.etailsupport.com

Or get in touch for a conversation about how we can help you

roger@etailsupport.com

Or give me a call on +44(0)7973 629916