Multi-channel retailing is vital term known to big eCommerce sellers. It is a way to sell products on various sales channels which includes social media platforms, shopping marketplaces or the company’s own website.
e-Commerce is defined as the sale and purchase of services and goods through electronic medium. Online shopping is what we commonly know it. e-Commerce portals includes retail selling, auction websites, business-to-business (b2b) services, music portals, consultancy websites, finance management websites etc.
Therefore the success of your eCommerce business shall just not depend on listing of products on a variety of platforms. It will require an effective multi-channel inventory management solution as well. For most retailers, it’s hard enough keeping track of inventory and orders when selling on a single platform.
Inventory management is a very integral part of your e-commerce business. If a proper management of inventory is not maintained following problems can be faced by business houses:
- A business can run at a risk of out-of-stock inventory.
- overstocking
- increasing delays
- cancellations due to inefficient fulfilment processes in absence of inventory management.
Unlike many business houses if you do not wish to end up making loss then best and most accurate way is to go for listing management software programs developed for multi-channel selling.
Benefits of Multi-Channel Listing Management Tools
Multi-channel listing management software provide huge benefits to the e-commerce, like:
- helps to track, manage and organize the inventory sales, purchases, and production processes through all channels.
- check the frequency of shipments, storage facilities and proper dispatching of the stock.
- easily synchronize Inventory Across all Channels.
- Provides solution for an effective way of handling both current and future orders to build up a profitable business.
How to be Successful with Multi-Channel Retailing?
Multi-channel retailing includes dealing in bulk variety of products being sold on a number of platforms. The basics of a successful multi-channel inventory management is to:
- Connect inventory to various channels.
- Maintain an inventory count in one location through actual product database.
- Prevent under and over selling of inventory by managing multiple warehouses.
- Set inventory allocations percentage of available inventory.
So if a business needs to maximize the sales across multiple sales channels it requires to expose its inventory through all of them. Therefore real-time stock management becomes important. Now a days e-commerce businesses use software to resolves these problems as they give a single, fully-integrated system with one user interface, and one location through listing of stock and managing it simultaneously across all the outlets becomes easy.
Multi channel inventory management sums up mainly the following:
- Real time stock synchronization
- Stock management
- Connecting all the web stores and work from a single interface.
- Keeping a track of the store when products are sold in portals
An effective inventory management is to minimize errors so that costly and time consuming errors like stocks running below E.O.Q. can be checked.
This management includes handling listings, orders, billing, shipping and messaging across multiple sales channels.
And finally the most important part that is handing the need of the consumers and dealing with their demands in the most effective way.
Multi channel inventory management by the selling platforms is a huge and one of the most important task. Since an effective management system requires a proper efficient team to conduct the whole operation day in and day out. Responsible inventory management leads to lots of time and money saving for the eCommerce houses.