Why Your Shopify Store Needs an Inventory Management Solution
The COVID Pandemic and eCommerce Growth
2020 was many things, not the least of which the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development called a “turning point” in eCommerce. Across the world, the effects of the eCommerce boom were felt. In the United States, we saw an eCommerce growth rate of a staggering 44% increase from 2019. This growth generated approximately $861.12 billion in online sales. For businesses equipped to handle a large sales influx, there was nothing to be concerned over. Still, for companies working with a patchwork of software or working exclusively with the tools provided by their platform, such as Shopify Inventory, the results can be less advantageous. Experts agree that proper inventory management systems are a critical factor for eCommerce businesses to be successful.
What is an Inventory Management System?
An inventory management system (IMS) is a piece of software that can provide for your company’s technological needs while managing all aspects of your inventory. When selecting an inventory management system, growing eCommerce businesses need only ask themselves a few essential questions:
- Scalability: Is the software capable of growing with your store?
- Ease of use: Do you understand all the functions of your inventory management system?
- Reliability: Can you access the system in a way that makes sense to you?
- Technology: Is the system capable of handling the tasks you need it to? Such as reporting, dynamically updated data, and more.
The Dangers of Not Using an IMS
For the many businesses that have found success on Shopify, the need for inventory management grows as their business does. It’s easy to see a dropshipping site as easy to manage, but managing inventory can be tricky. If your Shopify store is growing too fast, then monitoring inventory levels, tracking sales, managing vendors, and other tasks will become overwhelming. There is a constant threat of mistakes and errors when not tracking inventory properly. However, an IMS has many significant benefits:
- An IMS can plan and prepare for sudden sales spikes or drops by monitoring trends and referring to historical records.
- Provide increased sales productivity and improve delivery times, allowing your business to give customers a more accurate picture of their deliveries.
- By streamlining operations, you can focus on the more critical functions within the business.
Why Shopify Inventory Management Won’t Be Enough
Two factors of an inventory management system can cause significant headaches for eCommerce owners. While it is a top-notch eCommerce platform, Shopify won’t
- Automate your ordering and shipping processes
- Help to manage your product variants
Shopify can help with basic eCommerce needs but ultimately relies on third-party developers to offer unique solutions for their users.
For example, business owners should also consider accounting software and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software to care for and cater to their customers adequately. Shopify does not provide these out of the box. Instead, they have a marketplace with applications and extensions designed to add increased functionality to the platform. This lack of out-of-the-box functionality presents unique challenges for owners who need multiple applications. As you add more applications to manage multiple locations, handle return merchandise authorizations (RMA), and generate financial management reports, the more challenging it becomes. By integrating, synchronizing, and consistently updating an unruly list of software and extensions, you are almost certainly setting yourself up for hardship, if not failure.
What Can Be Done?
Ideally, you would look for an all-in-one solution to help automate the inventory management system, compile various essential reports and improve your business operations overall. While still seamlessly connecting to your Shopify store.
The team at My Office Apps has developed a fully integrated, cloud-based ERP system for Shopify users built to handle all data in real time. The Kechie system is fully integrated with your Shopify store. This allows store owners to take orders from Shopify and update their Kechie system. Any changes made to Kechie will dynamically update the Shopify store. This ensures that Shopify owners are never working with incorrect data.
Additionally, Kechie ERP is an entirely scalable solution, meaning that as the shop grows, so does Kechie. My Office Apps understand that businesses need room to grow, so they’ve designed Kechie to allow for unlimited transactions of all kinds. Best of all, Kechie is cloud-based, users can access their database from any web browser, a perfect companion for Shopify’s Mobile Shop Application. Kechie is more than just an inventory management system; it is a complete business improvement solution.
Contact us today to schedule a demo and see what Kechie ERP can do for your business.