If you operate or have thought of operating an online storefront, a question that you’ll want to answer is: “Should I sell across multiple online venues and storefronts?” The answer is a resounding “Yes!”
Since 2004, numerous online businesses have directly benefitted from selling their products on multiple sites, such as eBay, Amazon, Buy.com, Shopping.com and their own website (or websites). These business owners are also integrating their online storefronts with their ERP and CRM applications in order to deliver greater customer service and drive down business costs.
Why make multiple storefronts a key part of your business? Multiple stores bring greater opportunity to segment and uniquely target, leading to lower shopping cart abandonment and higher sales. Having multiple stores allows you to optimize your SEO (search engine optimization) and PPC (pay-per-click) efforts to drive more presence and traffic. And multiple stores lead to higher cross- and up-sell sales.
eCommerce Essentials
Be warned, though. You must have the right infrastructure or you run the risk of increasing cost and losing control of your business. So, before you jump to running multiple storefronts, consider the following:
- Shared Shopping Cart: Make sure your underlying systems allow your customer to have one, shared shopping cart as they traverse your storefront(s).
smb Webfront™ delivers user simplicity, easy tracking of inventory and orders, plus the opportunity to cross-sell and up-sell.
- Integrated Inventory Management: Don’t fall into the trap of having to manage multiple inventory systems each associated with their own storefront. Doing so adds complexity and cost to the business.
smb Webfront leverages the underlying capabilities of Microsoft Dynamics Online Commerce Services and becomes the central point for management for online product catalogs that can be published on multiple online marketplaces.
- Combined Order Processing: Ensure the highest level of order fulfillment by having all orders flow into a single order management system.
smb Webfront will help you better manage multiple order processing systems and provide insight if you need to add cost or increase probability of product ‘outages’.
- Comprehensive Content Management: Having to manage the same information multiple times drives up business cost and time, while reducing content timeliness and accuracy.
smb Webfront allows you to manage your product, catalog and inventory (for all marketplaces) in one location as well as provide a single location for your website information (text/links/images/SEO).
- Integrated Accounting: Running multiple storefronts will lead to more business activity. Make sure you stay ahead of the paperwork and accounting.
smb Webfront will help you minimize error, redundancy and reporting by having your storefronts integrated with financials.
- Measurement Tools: Critical to greater success and profitability is knowing what works and what doesn’t. Your infrastructure must be able to give you customer insight, marketing feedback, and sales behavior in order to improve your offering. Trust smb Webfront to deliver greater customer experience and satisfaction, as well as drive your business costs down.
Go ahead! Expand your business by expanding your storefront presence. You’ll be glad you did and smb Webfront can help get you there faster.
By SMB Suite
ERP, eCommerce and CRM Cloud Solutions
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