In case you haven’t heard (where have you been and can we join you?), the world has been dealing with an unprecedented global pandemic for the past year. Yes, it’s definitely been a year and Covid-19 has affected almost every sector of business. But, not quite like it has with ecommerce.
The ecommerce market has seen roughly 40% growth (an increase of $52 billion) since 2019. This applies to merchants with brick and mortar locations as well with BOPIS (buy online, pick-up in store) seeing an increase of 195% year over year. With more and more consumers becoming comfortable with their online purchasing habits, merchants are having to quickly shift their operations to support an influx of online orders.
If you didn’t have an online store set up pre-pandemic, you likely do now and you’re thinking about continued growth and efficiency in your operations. Covid-19 has given you the opportunity to expand your reach, but that’s only possible with the right tools. Manual processes are tedious, slow, and create errors. The biggest trend we’ve seen for growing ecommerce merchants is automation — automation in all areas of their business.
So, we figured we’d lend a helping hand and dig into some areas of your business that can easily be automated with the right tools. This is going to save you time and money in the long run — allowing you to get back to what really matters and reinvest in your business.
Accounting
Manual data entry is a drag and leaves a lot of room for human error, but it doesn’t need to. Keeping your sales channels, order management system, and accounting in sync with each other is critical to a healthy business and happy employees.
The go-to accounting system is QuickBooks and with good reason. They offer affordable plans and have lengthy industry experience making them a trusted platform. However, they don’t offer much in the way of automation.
That’s where tools like Connex come in. They enable you to connect multiple sales channels to one system and keep the data flowing to and from QuickBooks. With their match deposit tool and summary sync tool, your accounting team will be praising you for setting them up for success as you scale quickly.
Automation systems like this can be costly and this usually means the small businesses suffer. Connex offers flexible plans for growing merchants focused on amplifying employee productivity and improving your bottom line. With 30+ integrations, helpful features, a simple setup, and a free trial, there’s nothing to lose and only time to gain!
Inventory Management
Anyone that has ever had to manually take inventory knows how monotonous it can be. One can easily lose focus and this can lead to minor mistakes being made that cause lost revenue, customer dissatisfaction, as well as a hit to your bottom line. Knowing when and how to leverage an inventory management system can be a game-changer for your business, but let’s take it one step further.
Automating your inventory management will have you operating like you’re Amazon or Zara. It allows you to maximize your scalability by reducing the heavy lifting done by your team. Ordoro has integrations to all major sales channels, allowing you to view and sync everything under one platform. A single source of truth, if you will. You can automatically create purchase orders to replenish your products by creating low inventory thresholds. Also, utilize our new allocation feature and ensure you always have enough stock to ship out orders as they come in. Trust us, your customers will love you for it!
Order Management
Any business, from growing start-ups to fortune 500 retailers need an order management system. It’s critical to the success of your business and there’s no sugar-coating it. Spreadsheets aren’t going to cut it if you’re hoping to send out more than a handful of orders each month. Now, finding the right order management system can be a tedious process. You’ll want to make sure you find the right platform for your operations and your budget, especially if you want automation baked in.
A few features you might want to consider:
- Batch shipping label creation and printing
- Barcode scanning
- Kitting
- Dropshipping
- Pick and pack support
Ordoro was built with small businesses in mind by keeping our plans flexible and feature-rich. Once you’ve connected your sales channels to Ordoro you can select batches of orders, create shipping labels (at discounted rates), and set up automation rules and presets so you have more time for the things that matter — like growing your business. We’re here to help you get set-up with a FREE 30-day onboarding and lifetime support from our invaluable customer service team.
Customer Service
Say it with us people — customer service is what makes the world go round! Maybe that’s a bit of an exaggeration, but it’s not for your customers. An amazing support team and willingness to go the extra mile for your customers will help you grow faster than a cake from Alice in Wonderland. Consumers love to tell other consumers about brands to avoid due to poor customer service almost as much as they love to boast about companies that helped them out of a pickle.
However, the more you grow the more customers are going to reach out to you for myriad reasons. Keeping track of all those emails, calls, website inquiries can become a daunting task. Platforms like Zendesk can be an easy solution and well worth the money to keep customers happy. You can automatically route cases to members of your support team and unify your channels so no outreach goes unnoticed. With plans for everyone, Zendesk is a fantastic option for all online retailers — small or enterprise level.
Conclusion
Starting an ecommerce business is scary, but growing that business can be even more daunting. Finding the right tools early on can keep your team productive and operations error-free. The further down the road you go with manual processes and siloed platforms the harder it will be to transition to scalable practices.
The more efficient your team is the happier your customers will be. With competitors like Amazon, consumers expect great customer service and packages to arrive quickly, so whether it’s automating data entry into QuickBooks or using platforms like Ordoro for inventory and order management, it’s going to help you grow!
Is Ordoro the right fit for your business? Of course it is! Schedule a demo with one of our product experts or email sales@ordoro.com and we’ll set up a time with you.
