Direct purchase through smartphones and tablets with just a tap is increasingly becoming a common trend now along with traditional methods of shopping. The customers nowadays have options to conduct an extensive research before buying a product, as they have plenty of platforms to choose from for shopping. Therefore, retailers should have a good hold over online channels to reach out to the maximum number of customers through their preferred channel.
Multichannel is one of those approaches that retailers are adopting to reach their customers through different sources. It has a presence on different platforms like offline, mobile, website, social media, email, etc., providing customers different ways to purchase goods and services, thus reaching out to maximum number of customers through various platforms. Unlike omnichannel retailing, in this approach, all the channels are operated as they are different entities.
Managing different channels separately is a complex task for the retailers, as each channel needs a managed process for sales information, marketing, inventory, shipping and return. Few major challenges of multichannel retailing are consistent cross channel messaging and branding for sales of the products. Operating different platforms like Amazon, Ebay, Myntra means meeting different requirements. Moreover, the customers should be able to have the same experience of buying a product from all other sources like the ones from the website and stores. Also, any updation and addition should be immediately made available to all these different platforms so as to maintain the consistency of information for the customers.
Also Read: Can omnichannel retailing be a potential solution to combat COVID-19 crisis?
Another major challenges that crops up while managing multichannel retailing is inventory management. It becomes difficult for the retailers to manage supply demand or estimate the quantity of products that would be required as per each of the channels. This leads retailers to have either too much of inventory that is often wasted or sold at a discounted rate or a low inventory which might result in sales loss due to unavailability of the products. Without good software in place, it’s difficult to keep a track of sales and orders from each channel. Also, customer support and experience and managing the shipments and returns are cumbersome processes.
Technology today has simplified all the major problems of the industry. A good software system in place can help the retailers manage their different channels seamlessly.
Easyops: Cloud-based multichannel solution
Easyops, based in Bengaluru, is a retail business software supplier offerings software solution to enterprises. The company’s offerings include Easyops, a cloud-based multichannel retail business software and EasyGST, a GST enabled accounting system.
Easyops is a multichannel platform that provides API integration on all the major e-commerce platforms like Amazon, Flipkart, Snapdeal, Paytm and more. The technology automises most of the operations assisting retailers with better management of each of the channels. It provides a centralised real-time inventory management across all the channels so that each channel has the right quantity of products required for sales. It automatically updates the inventory levels across all the channels as soon as an order is made, reducing the risk of false information of the products on the sales channel. It also provides low stock alerts and smart replenishment for maintaining the stock so that there is no sales loss due to the unavailability of goods.
“Easyops is the only solution that provides a single view of all inventory, whether it is listed online on its own website like Shopify, a marketplace like Amazon or in their own bricks-and-mortar stores. Beyond inventory management, Easyops also provides POS for in-store billing, in-store or online promotions (using coupons, etc.), order management for online billing and order fulfillment, basic accounting and very importantly, deep analytics to help the retailers improve their inventory costs, sales promotions. All of these features help Easyops customers to increase their margins and scale their business.” explained Utpal Lotlikar, Founder, Easyops.
The pandemic has given new ways for the digital platform to boom. People who were not very comfortable with technology earlier are today experimenting with it for getting their jobs done. This is the right time that the retailers expand digitally, as the customers prefer digital channels to maintain social distancing. Commenting on the same, Utpal opined, “The retailers, who have established themselves with an online presence, have a head start and will come through this crisis quite well. Retail business works on trust and branding. Those who have established the trust through their brands online will have a better recall with their customers whom they have served during this crisis. Due to the services provided during this crisis, the retailers will earn a higher level of loyalty of their customers. However, these retailers will also require to have systems in place to have a single view of their inventory, both online and offline. This is easily done if they use new-age cloud-based retail technology solutions such as Easyops,”
Easyops is complete software to manage multichannel operations. It has features like order management, order fulfillment with integrated courier integration, outbox integration with Shopify, Magento, Woocommerce, Prestashop for seamlessly managing the offline and online retail. Besides, it also entails shipment tracking, operational accounting and cloud- based Billing Point of Sale (POS)/mobile POS.
The feature of order management enables to automatically pull and track orders across all channels from a single platform. This automates the order process and fulfillment across different warehouses and streamlines shipping of orders. The installation of the software allows manual tasks to be converted to automated tasks, thus reducing error and increasing the efficiency and productivity. It also helps in integration of all the various online, offline, warehouses and 3PL integration with real-time order management and inventory management platform. The intelligent solution allows retailers to expand sales by selling to platforms where the customers are buying. Not to forget that the software has a feature for automatic invoicing too with automatic generation of credit notes, track of payments, unpaid orders and generation of receipt of payments.
The software can also manage and keep track of the return orders. It performs functions like advance return notification, return analytics and return inward workflow. Sales analytics too is a part of its functionalities, which help to understand the best performing products of the stores both offline and online. It monitors key parameters and provides automatic recommendation to grow the business. Easyops is being used by retailers like Raghuvir Lifestyle, Rigo International, Franco Leone Shoes, Mafatlal, Bukkl Enterprises, Deivee By Milind Soman, Dchica and Sparx.
“We have always believed that making our product easy to use and fast will make our customers love us. And so, we are continuing investments in expanding the feature sets of our solution to cater to the different new models of retail business, for example, drop-shipping. We have currently released a beta version of our drop-shipping module and are also investing in various aspects of our products, be it in mobile apps for different operations or in our back-end systems to improve performance,” concluded Utpal.
