Enterprise eCommerce: How to shape the story of your growth

What is one thing that everyone wants? Success.

There is a difference between being successful and staying successful. And that difference is called Growth. It is a huge mistake to perceive success as one-time achievement. It is more like a journey, a continuous process and the element you need to ensure the continuity of your success is growth.

However growth isn’t for everybody. Some people just want to stay the same forever. Undoubtedly it is important to take that ‘first small step’ but some people just can’t take the second one because they lack the vision of being on the top. But you are not that someone. You have the vision to see what is invisible to others.

Let us take a glimpse into your vision:

You have got something valuable to sell and you also have people who wants to buy it. You have successfully tested the waters on the shore and got yourself a steady start. Within no time, you are ready to sail into the deep seas and grow your business.

You can no longer be limited by the options of places where you can sell. You don’t have to choose between offline OR online, instead now it has to be offline AND online. So the kind of options that you can consider are:

• Having your own retail store to sell offline
• Selling online on marketplaces like Amazon, eBay etc.
• Selling online on your own web store

Instead of limiting themselves to a single sales channel, growing business owners today are quickly embracing the concept of multi-channel selling. The main reason for this is today’s customers make no distinction between channels, they just want to buy from anywhere they like. Customers want to receive a consistent and personalized experience whether they buy online or offline. Therefore multi-channel selling is not only beneficial but also a necessity.

You have made the wise decision to sell anywhere, anytime. You have listed your products on Amazon and eBay, built your own web store and also sell through your retail store. And with this, you are able to gain more and more customers. You soon realize that this growth comes with a new challenge - Managing your growing business.

Initially when things were less complex, it was easy for you to keep track of your orders, manage inventory and other business operations. But now with multi-channel selling, you face challenges like:

• Maintaining separate Product Catalog for every single channel where you sell
• Synchronizing Inventory in real time across all sales channels
• Processing & Fulfilling Orders placed by customers at different places
• Printing shipping labels which are customized for each particular channel
• Managing Accounts and Invoicing for orders received on multiple channels
• Coordinating with 3PL(3rd Party Logistics) providers in such a complex selling network
• Managing Customer Relationship on each sales channel
• Providing customized promotional offers for each sales channel

Relax! I didn't mean to scare you. It is true that you will encounter such challenges as you scale up but that shouldn’t stop you from reaching out to the top. I wouldn’t simply list out the challenges without offering solutions to them. So let us quickly look into things you can do to tackle these challenges and manage your growing business better.

You realize that you can’t do everything manually and so you decide to get softwares to take care of your various business operations. And so for each and every problem, you get it’s own solution. You get a top of the line Order Management System to process your orders, a Store Builder software to build your web store, an Inventory Management System that takes care of stock levels, a CRM software that takes care of your customers, a retail POS software that runs on your retail store’s POS system, a shipping software that handles the shipping process and so forth.

This sounds like a good idea initially as every software does its own task in a nice manner. However, you soon realize that there is a major loophole in this system even after implementing technology. All these softwares are independent solutions of their respective domain and hence do not communicate with another domain. They do not treat your business as a holistic system but only their individual domain as a system in itself. And without proper communication and integration between different system components, you are back to square one. You spend most of your time trying to establish link between these individual systems and the major issue is that these softwares are not designed to work well with other systems. If you opt for this solution, not only do you waste your time getting these systems to work together but also invest a huge amount of money for these systems which did not serve your core purpose. So whether or not to trust your business with this solution totally relies on your wisdom.

Focus on your core business aspects is critical to your growth. So any decision that drives you away from your focus is a bad decision. Selecting any of the above two solutions will prove to be a bad decision for you in the long run. This calls for a need to come up with an ideal solution to tackle these challenges, so let us try to imagine what that ideal solution would look like.

What you need is a single unified solution that gives you a complete visibility of all the important processes, across various departments of your organization. The software must contain an inventory management system which not only syncs the stock levels in real time but also communicates with Order Processing system. When it comes to building your web store, you expect to create stunning CMS pages with the simplicity of drag and drop feature. To have various other domains like CRM, Accounting, Logistics, POS and much more, all under one roof and communicating well with each other would enable you to create well researched reports and make your business more scalable. Basically the ideal solution would be a software that provides you seamless integration across all your vital business operations.

You are presented with a roadmap of success, while mentioning all the hurdles that you are certainly going to face along your journey and also with variety of solutions that you can implement to tackle those hurdles. A visionary sees what’s invisible to others and you being one, surely will see the most ensuring pathway to your growth and success. We, at Emipro,  always aim to achieve what matters to you the most!

What is one thing that everyone wants? Success.

What is one thing that you need for your Growth & Success? Luceat.