How to simplify your ecommerce operation for greater returns

The smartest way to grow an ecommerce operation is to add new sales channels.

By Nasir Kothia, business development director, eBusiness UK

Utilising marketplaces such as Amazon and eBay is a great way to find new customers that aren’t visiting your site directly.

However, for every new channel you add, your operation becomes more complex. There’s no in-built way for one channel to talk to the next, and you may find yourself repeating updates to product listings, managing stock levels, promotions and customer communications across a number of individual sites.

It’s hard work - maybe you’re contemplating hiring new staff to manage it all - and soon your profits aren’t what you’d hoped.

Multichannel ecommerce management software is the answer, routing all your online sales orders through one central system. Our preference is Linnworks, a powerful tool that underpins over 4,000 ecommerce operations around the world.

Build this into your ecommerce business and all your orders go into in a single report, stock levels update in real time, and listings synchronise so updates and revisions made once are pushed out to each of your sales channels.

Link to your shipping company and your suppliers and everything will be despatched and reordered in a seamless and timely manner based on your predetermined rules.

Once orders are arriving and shipments leaving like an efficient, well-oiled machine, the platform adds further value by returning detailed reports. Taking data from across all of your channels, your software will analyse sales patterns, monitor marketing campaigns, and report back what’s making you money, what isn’t, and highlight how you can boost your bottom line even more.