Using Microsoft Dynamics RMS for Multi-Channel Retail Inventory Management

If you are in the retail industry, you’ve probably been hearing about the impact multi-channel selling can have on your retail business.  If you’re considering a multi-channel strategy, you’ll need to stay organized and maintain effective operations.   Keeping control of it all the different facets of a multi-channel retail environment can be a difficult task.  In this article, we’ll describe how you can use your existing Point of Sale solution to help you.

There are many POS solutions on the market today, but the article is going to address the Microsoft Dynamics RMS retail management solution.  In a multi-channel environment, maintaining and sharing your retail organization’s inventory with other channels is going to be critical.  nChannel’s connector for Microsoft Dynamics RMS can help you connect the Microsoft POS solution to other channel applications (your web site, eBay, Amazon, etc.) sending data back and forth in real time improving inventory visibility for you and your customers. (more…)

Register Today for a Sneak Peek of nChannels New GP Connector

Connect Microsoft Dynamics GP with your ecommerce website in under 40 minutes. See it live May 31st!

Thursday May 31st at 12:00 PM EST

NEW – Microsoft Dynamics GP Connector

New Capabilities Hot Off the Press

Cloud-Based Reporting

Log in to nChannel through any internet connection to view total sales from web sites, or stores by day, week, month, or year. View sales by tender, or drill into details to view sales for a particular store or channel.  Our new reporting capabilities contain online templates to view additional up-to-the-minute customer and inventory reports too such as inventory by location, accounts receivable, and more.  We’ll showcase this feature in our upcoming webcasts, or you can request a quick demo here.

Create and Manage Unlimited Price Lists

Creating and managing price lists for all sales channels has never been easier.  This new feature enables users to create price lists and assign them to items for each sales channel or location.  Select items by brand, manufacturer or supplier. Apply pricing for specific time periods, and even choose pricing to reflect the sale price, regular or supplied price.  With the ability to create and save forumula’s executing promotions is a snap.

Integrated Field Sales Orders Included!

For those customers that want to take sales to other venues, our new Field Sales Order capabilites enables users to create orders and sales transactions from any tablet or smartphone from any place – at a tradeshow, street fair, or customer site. Field sales orders will be sent to Microsoft Dynamics RMS, a supplier, or any other system you choose.   With our new Mercury Payments Systems connector customers can take credit card order and  assign shipping charges.  Best of all – this capability comes with every nChannel subscription – no extra fees, software or contracts needed!

So Why Aren’t You an nChannel Partner Yet?

nChannel Value Added Resellers can provide multi-channel capabilities to customers in a do-it-yourself environment.  Run your own sales cycle, quote your own work, subscribe and support new customers – without specialised training, resources, or fees.  Resellers earn monthly recurring revenue for each subscription account, and 100% of implementation and support fees.  Have a customer in mind?  Attend one of our webcasts, or contact us for complete details. Click Here! for the nChannel Partner Page

Create and Manage Price List Feature

nChannel now offers subscribers the ability to create and manage an unlimited number of price lists unique to each channel you serve. Apply price lists to stores, web sites, or both!

Look what you can do with this cool new feature:

– Select items manually or apply a unique price list for items by manufacturer, supplier or brand
– Set start and end dates for your price lists which will revert back to the pricing you choose when your promotion is over
– Create and store unique formulas to quickly apply a percentage or dollar amount discount
– Determine which channels you’d like to apply to your price list
– Set the type of price you’d like to change – sale price, regular price, supplier price

“Manually managing pricing and promotions was one of the biggest challenges we needed to solve” -Paul Donnelly, Ohio Mulch

In Ohio Mulch’s case, they sell through 21 stores and 5 web sites. Each of their websites serves a regional market where products can differ, and weekly promotions are unique to that market. We’ve heard from many companies over the years lamenting this same challenge – and we’re excited to announce our new pricing feature designed to help companies manage pricing promotions.

Once a price list has been published it can be edited at anytime and if you make a mistake, fixes are simple and best of all – immediate! We’ve got lots more to share – Take a look at our calendar for upcoming webcast, visit our connector pages, or call us for a quick demo.

Multi-Channel Reporting at 35,000 Ft.

Southwest Airlines offers Internet service for just $5 bucks. Steve and I are making our way to Vegas for the Magento Partners Conference and with a 4 hour plane ride ahead of us, I couldn’t resist logging on. I’m writing this on Sunday from about 35,000 feet – pretty cool huh?

Here’s something cooler.

I’m so jazzed about our new reporting tools that I logged into one of our customer’s accounts just to see what’s going on. This particular customer has 21 retail stores and 5 – yes 5 – web sites. From the friendly skies I can tell you what today’s sales looks like in each of their stores. I can tell you which store is doing the best, which location is leading sales for the week, month, and even what their sales year-to-date are. Right now it’s 3:45 pm Eastern Standard Time. The stores will be closing at 6pm and I see that our customer did a little over $21,000 in Visa transactions today. Even on a crappy day like today (45 degrees in April!!) they had a healthy $55,000 dollar day. Kudos to Stores #5 and #3 too – – they had double the sales of other stores today. Woo-hoo!

So while this Internet connection is just a bit slow – how cool is it to know that if I was the business owner for this customer – I could be anywhere – on my couch, in a plane, in a car (ok maybe not in a car) and get up to the minute information on how my business is doing? I didn’t mention that I could check what today’s receivables look like or look at inventory across all my locations – because honestly – – I’m ready to get back to playing solitaire (and my battery is about to run out). Before I sign off though, check out this week’s webcast hosted by Retail Realm which will feature our new Magento connection. We’ll show our new reporting feature as well as a few other goodies. Where else can you create a new Magento website and feed items to it from RMS in under 40 minutes?….only from nChannel of course!

–Lisa

Take a Look at Our New Magento Conector

Retail Realm will feature nChannel in their upcoming webcast series on April 26th at
10 am PST |1 pm EST. If you didn’t get an invite yet, you can register

In this 45-minute webinar presentation, we’ll give an overview of our cloud-based management platform and show you how to connect RMS to eCommerce solutions like Magento in less than a day. Our newest connector for Magento is now in General Release, putting the power of connection in your hands for a fraction of the cost, and a fraction of the time it takes to configure and install other solutions.