How to Improve Inventory Management in Shopify
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.
Improve business efficiency with Artificial Intelligence
Are Your Employees Spending Too Much Time on the Hamster Wheel?
In previous blogs, we described how Artificial Intelligence techniques (AI) in an ERP system can help improve efficiency and accuracy in your operations. It can also free up employee resources with extra time for creative activities to add value for your business. In this blog, we will describe one feature in our Kechie™ ERP system that uses AI techniques to automatically generate a whole series of new part numbers.
In any business, a critical item used in tracking almost every transaction is the Part Number or SKU (Stock Keeping Unit). Part numbers are used in sales orders, purchase orders, manufacturing, inventory tracking, invoicing and everywhere in between. The use of part numbers creates differentiation between multiple items for ordering, picking and packing the exact item requested by the customer. Many companies have thousands (or millions) of part numbers in their system. Managing this giant mass of data can become impossible without strong processing software to assist along the way.
New part number creation is one activity that can be quite time consuming for your staff, particularly when a large number of new part numbers need to be added at the same time. For the apparel industry, this can be a daunting task. For example, a buyer wants to add a new style shirt to the inventory. The shirt is available in long-sleeved and short-sleeved, classic and slim fit, sizes include extra small, small, medium, large, extra-large, and available in the sixteen colors. That’s 320 new sku’s to be added to the system. One-by-one, an employee sits in front of a screen and adds new parts numbers – perhaps a multiple day project. Is there a better use of this resource?
Here’s where a built-in intelligence can save the day. Kechie delivers a function that can automatically create part numbers and add them to the system. An employee can now focus on descriptions and selling features for a quick-to-market process rather than being bogged down with keystrokes. The artificial intelligence features in Kechie not only help set up new products – but can help your sales staff to up-sell features and products to maximize profitability. More will be revealed on this feature in coming blogs.
My Office Apps, Inc., a business process improvement company, is committed to providing continued improvements and incorporating various advanced AI techniques in our Kechie ERP software. Our goal is to provide the best processing solutions for small and medium sized businesses in order to contribute to the success of our customers. In the coming weeks, we will post additional articles that describe some of the specific AI features present in the Kechie ERP software and also provide a road map for other features that we expect to implement in the future. Our focus is not to just provide AI for AI’s sake, but rather to implement practical AI functions that can make a real difference in your business. For more information, you can visit www.myofficeapps.com or better yet, call us at (949) 486-1947 and ask us to schedule a demo so you can view these features for yourself.
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