The key to your online sales success is better implementation of your knowledge in development of the sales strategy. You can only achieve this if you spend more time on research and less time on routine jobs. You might have found that inventory and order management takes awful amount time. However, I find it very hard to understand why so many small businesses spend time on the routine tasks and disregard sales strategy which actually they should look at more than anything else. This is the only way to go forward and grow your business.
Try to find ways to automate the processes which you already know. If there are recurring questions from your customers, why not make response email templates. I am sure you will find your customer support team finishing their job in half the time they used to! Similar is the case of order management. If you have multiple sales channel why not automate the process of getting invoices and shipping them. Let me introduce “Linnworks Express”, a FREE order management system to suit your need. Yes, it is FREE with no catch. Let’s see what you can achieve with this software.
You will see your orders from eBay & Amazon or your own website at one place allowing you to print invoices, shipping labels and picking/packing list with one click. I don’t disagree with the fact there is learning curve to apply this. However, once you learn the process, the routine order management process becomes quick and easy.
Remember if your business expands beyond online sales, then Linnworks also provides integration with telesales, direct orders and an integrated EPOS (electronic point of sale) system.
Most of the business must have noticed the issue with overselling when you operate multiple sales channels. It is very difficult to be 100% efficient in updating the inventory over multiple sales channels manually. The consequence, unhappy customers with unfulfilled orders! With this software if you sell a product through one channel it updates the inventory level across channels so you know you are not going to oversell it and yet the inventory is visible in all sales channels. You have better inventory visibility with no risk!
Shipping your orders on time is important part of order processing. You would want to let customers know that their orders have been dispatched on time and that they can track their orders line with certain codes. Now, you can do all these with a click. You can generate labels from Linnworks saving you time having to switch to the shipping company’s label printer along with automatic recording of the tracking codes. You have now better informed customers about their orders putting less pressure on your customer support team.
If you are not happy with above free features, Linnworks has more for you.
- You can establish your business brands with customised invoice templates with your company logo. This is very important to promote your own web store.
- You can automate email notifications to talk to your customers as you need. This can be handy when there are issues like delay in delivery due to weather conditions when you tend to get many “where is my order” queries.
All in all, you have a clever system to suit your order processing needs for FREE. The key is to get comfortable with this service and see if you need any extra to help your business. Do you think Linnworks express would do well for your growing business?
