Sadly, many businesses invest a lot of time, money and effort in a separate ecommerce/shopping portal. This leads to ongoing frustrations and waste in synchronising their shopping platform with their other business systems (inventory, logistics, accounting).
An ecommerce site is much more than images of products to sell. The following are just some of the many benefits and functionality which Infoware’s ecommerce component will give you. If you have additional requirements, contact us.
If you don’t have this functionality now and believe your business deserves it, it is time to have an introductory chat with Infoware Services.
The benefits of a single system, single solution, including ECommerce are manyfold:
- Real time; part of a single site, single solution integrated ERP vs lack of integration or manual effort between external ecommerce portal and other disparate business systems.
- No initial and ongoing IT costs to transfer data between systems.
- Stock availability, including across multiple warehouse tracking in real time without costly 3rd party integrations.
- Mobile friendly – allow your customers to place orders from anywhere 24/7.
- Payment gateway for B2B, B2C or credit, depending on individual customer terms.
- Potential to remove account credit effort and increase cash flow by receiving immediate payments.
- Create product code – available now – or delay to a planned release date. This is all that is required for a product to show on your website (and the rest of your business management system).
- Add images, content, brochures, and other product-relevant links (safety data sheets, ingredients, technical data sheets) – a major commitment for a successful website is managing new product onboarding for all parties (customers, sales and customer service staff).
- Show customers’ specific prices, and highlight promotions including selling obsolete stock. Not only are flexible pricing strategies supported, but you can also define future prices in advance so these kick in automatically when customer orders are entered for delivery on a price-effective date. No panic rushing to upload price changes the day they change (or customers complaining you charged the wrong price because you took too long to change prices).
- Show selected customers accurate available stock and quantity on order.
- Flag products you may wish to be visible but with sell price on application (POA). Flag these products on creation so customer enquiry form is available. These create a quote so enquiry cannot be lost or missed.
Infoware provides simple tools to manage your Ecommerce site
- Real time; part of a single site, single solution integrated ERP vs lack of integration or manual effort between external ecommerce portal and other disparate business systems.
- A Product can be in multiple web categories:
– Product Type(s)
– Industry Specific - New products menu option is automatically managed so customers can see What’s New.
- What’s on Special with predefined date ranges to set up in advance.
- Managing obsolete/end-of-life products – tick the product as run out and, once there is no stock available, the product disappears from the customer order portal (both searching for products, customer history templates and manually created customer order templates).
- Change pricing for a customer or group and then automatically apply changes to the ecommerce site and the rest of the business. One system = one solution No pricing inconsistencies between external ecommerce sites and your other business systems.
Make your customers’ lives easier:
- Email customer order acknowledgement when the order is placed.
- Some of your corporate customers (govt depts, councils) require quotes before placing an order – let them create their own quotes for internal approvals (if price is already defined).
- Some other corporate customers may require internal approvals before approving orders. Let the order be created by the line manager (e.g. a restaurant shift manager or cleaning contractor). Their manager can then approve, and the order is created on Infoware’s Run Planner.
- Place order online ready for customer/courier pickup when required as an alternative to delivery.
- Create, or allow customers to create their own order templates, including determining the sequence products are listed on the templates. This allows them to go around their store(room) in their location sequence to place orders.
- Freight tracking if your couriers provide tracking links.
- Account service portal to retrieve copies of invoices, quotes, POD’s.
- Flag selected customers who require a mandatory customer order number so there are no unnecessary hold ups for approval of payment.
- Creation of customer orders immediately ready for picking (subject to passing credit control check). No data entry; no errors or needing to pass through customer service. Remove admin time completely; customer places order then immediately slotted in for picking.
- Generate a price list they can upload into their own system.
- Transparency with other partners – e.g. supplier reps who use (or you would like to use) your business for supply to local customers.
- Allow supplier reps to enter customer specific rebates (supplier funded discounts).
And now you have an ecommerce solution ready to go, and ready to start working for your business.
Make Your Life Easier
An ecommerce customer self-service solution provides features and facts to empower your customers to determine simple product decisions or issues on their own. This allows your sales team to focus on more complicated requirements, rather than every individual order. Also, your customer service team is removed from data entry/administration of customer orders – unless the customer fails a credit control block!
This makes the customer’s overall experience more satisfying. They can find more information about previously purchased products as well as alternative products. They can discover new products and the ranges you provide. And, of course, they can do this at a time that suits them – not necessarily during your office hours.
Getting your customers involved in choosing you as their supplier has never been more critical.
Remember the product onboarding step is critical for your ecommerce platform success. Create the product, have your sell price points defined, load the image and any relevant fact sheets/brochures immediately so all partners (not only customers, but sales staff, customer service and logistics) are getting the same information from release day.
Footy Tipping Newsletter – June 2023