A poll by the AuctionBytes Blog shows that 84% of online merchants sell on multiple channels. The most popular ones are eBay (used by 81.5% of sellers) and Amazon (44.6%), while selling on their own website is chosen by 37.7% of surveyed merchants. There are a number of problems that multi-channel sellers have to cope with, but according to Julia Wilkinson, the editor for the AuctionBytes Blog, probably the largest challenge is keeping the inventory straight. Simply said, it means that most online merchants feel that having to go through all the marketplaces to update the stock after every single transaction is a total waste of time. Having to manage the stock manually can negatively influence any online business both presently and further down the road, as it forces some of the larger sellers to place different items on different marketplaces and prevents expansion to new sales channels when managing inventory becomes too much of a hassle.
Exploring new ways to sell by trying out new online marketplaces is something that any seller has to do if they’re looking to expand their business. A handful of new potential sales channels are born and some of the older ones wither away every year, so a successful online merchant is constantly prospecting the market for new opportunities. However, there are some obstacles in doing that, such as the lack of time and the need of additional investments (for some of the marketplaces). But probably the most significant issue here is the need to manually update the stock in each and every one of the new marketplaces – add that to all the old and tried sales channels and you’ll spend half of the day doing inventory updates. That’s what discourages most of online merchants to expand their business, losing hundreds of sales opportunities.
So the problem here is evident: updating inventory manually is an obstacle that makes selling online significantly harder than it should be. And that is where an app like Ordoro can make a big difference. Ordoro is the smartest shipping app because it comes with built in inventory management. Using Ordoro, you can aggregate all your orders into a single dashboard, where you can print USPS, UPS, and FedEx shipping labels AND it automatically updates the stock in all your sales channels. Actually, it was one of the main reasons we founded Ordoro in 2010. We knew the obstacles that multi-channel sellers face, including shipping management and keeping inventory in sync. The main difference is that we looked at it all as one single problem – is there so much of a benefit in being able to comfortably print shipping labels while you still have to spend hours every day updating inventory in all of the sales channels that you use? We think not – and that’s why Ordoro does what it does.
Let’s say you sell an item on your online store on Shopify. Once you sell an item that you also list on the marketplaces, you’ll have to go to Amazon, eBay and wherever else you’re selling and update the stock for that particular item. And what happens if you only have one in stock and transactions on multiple marketplaces are carried out simultaneously? One of your customers isn’t getting the item, causing numerous problems for your business. With Ordoro, the stock will be updated automatically as soon as the transaction is made. Not only does it save a lot of your precious time, but also helps you protect your seller ratings by abolishing the possibility of selling the same item to multiple customers at the same time.
Ordoro is currently fully integrated with both of the largest online marketplaces (eBay and Amazon) and some of the best shopping cart platforms on the internet (including Shopify, Bigcommerce, Magento, 3dcart). Don’t worry if some of your sales channels aren’t here, as we’re constantly working on building new partnerships with various online marketplaces. So if it’s not on Ordoro today, it might be here tomorrow – please don’t hesitate to contact us at 512.271.9453, info@ordoro.com or @ordoro for more information.
