Running your own business is no joke; the hours are long, and no one tells you about the sacrifices you’re going to have to make to get the company up and running and make it successful. If they did, no one would start a business ever!

Because StoreFeeder works with eCommerce businesses, we will be focussing on eCommerce in this blog. Specifically, those that sell across multiple channels and marketplaces.

Let’s begin; you have your website; you’re set up on eBay and Amazon, maybe a couple of other marketplaces too. And the daily routine begins.

Download the orders, pick the orders that you have in stock, get them all nicely packed and then you’re off to the Post Office to send them out to your lovely customers. In between all that, you get a delivery of more stock. The new stock gets checked in and then put away. After doing all that, you must respond to questions, revise listings, add new products, and keep your books up to date. What about marketing? Social media? Promotions? Looking for new products? Meeting suppliers. Then, there’s the family? Dog? Cook some food? Perhaps some downtime?

Running your own business, even with a team of dedicated staff, takes time, and no matter how good your supply chain is, the one thing they can’t sell you is time.

This is the reason StoreFeeder was designed. In this blog, we are going to look at the benefits of automating certain parts of your business; first up:

Order Imports and managing stock

Managing multiple channels means that you have orders coming into several dashboards. Log in, download them, print them, get them and dispatch them. However, if you’re selling the same items across all channels, you need to divide the stock to manage the inventory and avoid overselling. Imagine that you have five widgets on your mains site, 20 on eBay, five on Etsy? It’s not great. Worse is you find you’ve sold out one channel and have loads left on the other channels. You’ll never know what sales you missed. Or which customers you disappointed, it’s too late. They bought from someone else.

This is where automation is helpful. Software like StoreFeeder can integrate all of your channels into one dashboard. Setting up each SKU as a product, from which you can list to channels, gives you the advantage of having all the inventory of that SKU available across all channels.

Let me explain. A product is just that; it could be a ball or a rolling pin. Either way, you have twenty of them in your warehouse. That product and all its attributes are held in StoreFeeder under that product tab. The listing on eBay, your site, or Amazon advertises that product. That’s it; it is that simple, listings are adverts. If you have 20 rolling pins in stock, you can list 20 on each channel.

As the rolling pins sell, StoreFeeder imports that information from the channel and makes the necessary adjustments to the stock level, then updates all of your channels with the new stock number.

The benefit is that all of your stock is available across all your channels. It is kept up to date, meaning you do not oversell and, more importantly, you do not miss any sales. Another benefit is that you can manage all of your orders from one dashboard! One Dashboard!

Log in – get the order, the stock is correct, and you are good to go. That is time saved – only you know how valuable that is to your business. Automating orders and stock management is a simple thing that saves you time and money. Once those tasks are taken care of, the additional time and money saved gives the most precious of resources, time. Use this to execute your business growth plans.

In part two, we’re going to look at warehousing and dispatch. Thanks for reading this week’s blog; we appreciate it.