Whether your inventory is sizable or growing quickly, or youre ramping up for the holidays, saving time and controlling costs are important. Ordering items, evaluating how much to keep on hand, how much you should have at any given time, and what the carrying costs are, is a year round process.
Its not uncommon for the POS, Accounting or ERP system to have inventory functions to help you do this selecting which one and how to get all your systems to play together nicely is a common problem.
Manually updating each system is perceived as easier and cheaper. During the holiday selling season there is no time to download and manually key (or rekey) orders, keep inventory in sync and populate web sites with item data, let alone update order status and maintain great customer service.
Knitting different systems together with visibility into one system at a time takes time, money and resources. All systems need to work together seamlessly so you can increase sales, improve customer service and optimize inventory.
Integrated Web Stores
With an integrated web store retailers can share CRM, order entry, inventory management, fulfillment, shipping, financials and business intelligence reporting between systems to help get information and goods where they are neededfast.
Companies can get immediate feedback on business performance, automate manual procedures, eliminate rekeying of data, improve replenishment decisions; process orders more quickly, improve fill rates and customer satisfaction and get better returns on inventory investment.
Web Store Inventory Synchronization
Automated inventory synchronization saves time, and improves customer service because customers arent purchasing items that are out of stock. Automated order entry saves time, reduces errors, reduces cost of returns and improves customer satisfaction so theyll buy again.
Integration points run deeper than exposing inventory to all channels, they include: routing orders to stores and warehouses for ease of fulfillment, and to a merchandising system so available-to-promise inventory is accurate.
Customer Data Integration with Web Stores
Retailers realize they need to find centralized integration platforms to share product, purchase and customer data, order and inventory processing, ERP and accounting systems that create value-added services, capture customers orders and maintain a competitive advantage. And they want it done in days, not months.
Customers expect their orders to be filled faster and more accurately than ever before. In these profit-squeezed conditions, retailers must work harder and managed smarter than ever before.
Having the power of an engine like nChannel behind you to manage multiple channels, collect and process shopping and purchase data from all channels also gives retailers a better understanding of customer needs and behaviors for future promotions.
The potential sharing of processes, time saving, speed to market with items and technology can be achieved through an integrated channel strategy and will significantly help to improve a retailers channel cost structure. (Especially with deferred payment for a new web store until January, 2013.)
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