Ecommerce managers are under increasing pressure to meet customer expectations across every marketplace, brand website, retail store, and wholesale channel. NetSuite ERP does a great job of addressing the basic, core operations and finance but it wasn’t designed to support the complete modern multi-channel seller requirements. With a growing business, it doesn’t take long for companies to discover that just ERP can result in bottlenecks, errors, and missed opportunities.
To keep up with competition, today, businesses need tools that can go beyond ERP that can link every supplier, sales channel, inventory and fulfillment source. Flxpoint provides this missing layer, giving retailers and brands the automation capability to scale without having everything done manually. By introducing Flxpoint’s solutions as their digital backbone, Ecommerce managers gain oversight and control to stay competitive.
What is multi-channel selling?
Multi-channel selling is more than just listing products on Amazon, eBay, and your branded online store. It involves taking action to control product data, pricing, and availability from each single thing customers are buying from. When everyone involved operates from the same set of data systems (timely, and accurate), multi-channel sellers can do what retailers hope to do, which is to reach broader audiences while providing customers with consistent shopping experience.
For example, while a distributor sells to customers directly through Shopify, it also has bulk items listed on B2B marketplaces. Without tools capable of centralized systems, each channel creates major silos requiring unnecessary duplicated tracking and manual oversight. Multi-channel selling means having connected systems that speak to each other in real time, and control inventory, orders, and product information consistently, everywhere.
The complexity multiplies as a business grows. Each new channel meets different requirements for product listings, shipping times, and return policies. Customers are looking for speedy delivery and accurate information regardless of which channel they are buying from. When growing sales by selling on multiple channels, it’s not just limited to extending the reach of your store, but it requires more accuracy and consistency to match the demands of rising expectations.
Common ERP limitations in ecommerce
NetSuite ERP has specific capabilities for accounting, finance, and core business functions, but was not built to manage the complexities of ecommerce and multi-channel selling experience. NetSuite’s core limitation is that it does not have native integrations with dozens of marketplaces and supplier networks. Companies are bolt-on to run functions through required spreadsheets or workaround third-party solutions.
Speed is another issue. No matter what marketplace you sell on, it seems everyone is looking for lightning-fast inventory and pricing update turns. Typical ERPs require batch settlements or updates, which could create a longer update lag than the time it took for an item to sell. Between these lags and volumes of complexity, duplication, and moving parts, you can oversell or risk losing valuable customers from stockouts.
Reliance solely on ERP systems would create additional manual processes, not less, for ecommerce operations managers operating multiple sales channels. Scalability is another aspect to consider. As businesses expand, the volume of data grows significantly. Just ask any professional ecommerce employee how many times they’ve diamonds with spreadsheets and gave up at some point.
ERPs it can feel like processing frequent updates from multiple sales channels is ridiculously processing. Barring out the fact that you have automated tools (how much work is left for a team to respond to recent errors or data cleanup, before realizing the opportunity of recovery). Solutions like Flxpoint effectively step into an automation gap of flexibility that traditional ERP fails to provide.
The advantages of real-time inventory syncing
Correcting errors in real-time sync of inventory is a core tenet of ecommerce success. It is the advantage of capacity in real-time of updates accounts for the last sale, and no matter from which channel the sale is generated from, the inventory deficiency can be red flagged before overselling, and less potential backorders and consolidating customer service brand reputation.
Flxpoint brings together sources, warehouses, and marketplaces, enabling every item to track through the buying and fulfillment experience. The level of transparency reduces uncertainty and creates confidence for the ecommerce manager. The real-time sync serves up distributed inventory, allowing the company to ship from the closest or most cost-effective source without the integrity of the availability errors happening.
The benefits of real time sync extend beyond simply property stock outs. This data gives ecommerce managers access to source new items more accurately, improve forecast accuracy, and be aware of demand trends. If there is a spike in demand for a product in one marketplace, with synced inventory, that spike will also translate across the entire customer journey at each connected channel before more sales can be lost.
The enablement of real-time data allows merchants greater agility to be proactive against their competitors who are still drawing from historical data.
Why order automation eliminates errors
The order entry stages are one of the largest areas prone to mistakes in ecommerce with the majority of the risks associated with human error, including typos, delays and updates missing orders which ultimately cause a negative customer experience. Order automation eliminates the risks of human error. It automatically feeds sales from every channel directly into the right supplier and/or warehouse.
For example, Flxpoint can automatically determine whether a sales order is going to be fulfilled through a 3PL, a dropship vendor, or from the company’s own inventory. In all cases that saves you time and money related to fulfillment. Order automation removes the spreadsheets and focuses from your team to avoid human errors and allows your team to focus on their intentional strategies for bigger growth.
Order automation, the benefits of which you can learn about on this page, provides customer experience certainty. Retailers are already seeing all of the benefits of order automation. Overall, fulfilling orders is quicker and with less mistakes; you spend less time managing customer complaints, there is less incidence of flaky customer experiences, and simply putting less pressure on your delivery timelines.
These advancements are possible because your management team has instant visibility into the orders they place, process, and ultimately deliver. If and when you have exceptions, you can build orchestration to create a seamless pipeline from purchase to completion, earn consumer trust, cultivate loyalty, and make it much easier and convenient for him or her to use your services again.
E-commerce integration trends ahead
The e-commerce world, in terms of integration, is complicated and is still evolving. Retailers are going to unified commerce. A unified commerce is a version of a channel that removes barriers as much as possible between online and offline touchpoints.
Consumers now expect they can buy a product online and pick-up in store, and also return the same product in-store, no questions asked of how or where a retailer sourced the item they provided. ERP type systems cannot provide the emergence of this flexibility in integration.
Future solutions will integrate flexibility heavily and create opportunities for organizations to pivot easily to new marketplaces and sales models. Automation platforms will begin to leverage AI in their solutions so retailers can leverage machine learning to more accurately forecast demand, maximizing routing efficiencies and improving customer experience.
For example, better predictions and decision making before an order has been generated — as in, forecasting which warehouse would be best for an order to be fulfilled, BEFORE the customer placed the order. For e-commerce companies using NetSuite or other ERP, they may be utilizing dynamic pricing based on market fluctuation.
Another trend will be collaboration with suppliers. Presently suppliers should anticipate as businesses proceed with configuring their technologies to integrate their sales channel systems, suppliers’ systems, and their own systems, chances for collaboration will surface. This would ultimately enable supply chain partners to achieve deeper end-to-end visibility from raw materials entering the suppliers process to delivery to a customer’s place of business or home.
Flxpoint and automating graphics and other applications will be responsible for pushing integration process out, creating a more seamless future. And lastly, I will touch on regulatory compliance and data security issues. As compliance regulations tighten, ecommerce managers will likely be tasked, to ensure that their network of interconnected systems – integrate consumer data protections and are compliant with regulations.
As such, there needs to be clear governance on automation platform integrations connected to e-commerce.
In closing
As e-commerce continues to evolve, the organizations that will thrive will be the organizations that are willing to move to integrated solutions. The future isn’t ‘ERP’ or ‘Automated’, the future is opportunity for both ‘ERP’ and ‘Automated’ to exist together, creating an operational structure that is more coordinated, timely, and robust.
