In the past, customers had to physically go out and shop for goods, severely limiting what they were able to find based on their location, budget and time constraints. With the boom of e-commerce, they can now find and compare products across a multitude of marketplaces all in a matter of minutes!
To achieve a consistent presence wherever your customers go, you’ll need to adopt an omnichannel strategy – a task that’s easier said than done. The key to succeeding as an omnichannel seller is finding solutions that enable you to scale your business with efficiency and precision. To help you get started, we’ve put together this comprehensive checklist.
Catalog and listings
Maintain your product listings across channels
Keep your listings up-to-date
With your products listed on multiple channels, you’ll need a strategy to ensure all of your listings (images, descriptions, SKUs, etc.) are always up-to-date and optimized for each channel.
Know your channel guidelines
Each channel comes with its own guidelines and best practices for listings, fulfillment, shipping, returns and more. Make sure you have resources in place to stay on top of these guidelines and maintain compliance.
Support international customers
Each channel comes with its own guidelines and best practices for listings, fulfillment, shipping, returns and more. Make sure you have resources in place to stay on top of these guidelines and maintain compliance.
Inventory
Know what you have and where you have it
Track the entire product lifecycle
As your operations scale, you’ll need to track the entire lifecycle of your products – from purchasing to processing RMAs. This ensures you know where everything is across multiple distribution centers, and you can keep your inventory rotated to sell your oldest stock first.
Prevent running out of stock
Manually sorting and scanning inventory in spreadsheets to discover low stock is inefficient at scale. As an omnichannel seller, you’ll need to proactively discover and address low inventory using tools like automated low inventory alerts.
Shipping
Coordinate efficient logistics
Set smart shipping parameters
To achieve maximum efficiency, you need to set smart parameters for fulfillment and shipping. If you have multiple distribution centers and multiple carriers, setting automated criteria for when and how orders are shipped can reduce costs and speed up deliveries. For example, you can automatically ship orders from the closest warehouse or add insurance to orders over $100.
Give customers visibility
Today’s e-commerce shoppers expect full visibility into the fulfillment, shipping and returns process. The problem is, you can’t provide this benefit if you don’t have it yourself! For you and your customers’ sake, you’ll need to implement a solution that allows you to track orders from the moment of purchase all the way to their doorstep.
Reporting
Grow your business strategically
Get the insights you need
Finally, you’ll need advanced, accurate reporting to truly succeed with an omnichannel strategy. Manually compiling and slicing data from multiple channels is an arduous process and doesn’t allow your business to make agile decisions at scale. An automated program can aggregate data from multiple sources at every stage of the product life cycle and instantly give you the granular insights you need, including:
- Profitability per product and per channel
- Long-term trends and forecasts for demand
- Bottlenecks and inefficencies in your business processes
Every channel, one solution.
The true secret to efficiency and cost savings with an omnichannel strategy is having one platform that solves all of your needs at every step of the product life cycle.
With Sellercloud, you’ll no longer waste time switching between multiple platforms and manually exporting data. You’ll also eliminate the risk of dangerous “blind spots” between key business functions that lead to breakdowns and inefficiencies.
The result?
• End-to-end visibility
• Increased operational efficiency
• Better strategic insights
• Reduced costs by eliminating multiple platform subscriptions
We recognize how important it is to connect with your customers where it matters.
That’s why we set out to create the most powerful, all-encompassing e-commerce solution on the market.
We’ve helped hundreds of sellers achieve omnichannel success using our fully integrated platform, and we’d love to help you, too.
To experience the difference for yourself, request a demo today.