Success in Retail is Hidden in Establishing the Right Digital Infrastructure!

Today's customers expect the same diligence and quality service from retailers both in the physical and virtual world. The aim in multi-channel retailing is to enable customers to conduct their research and purchasing activities according to the method they want.

And yet, as the consumer's expectation of shopping from different channels in the same experience, speed and accuracy increases, the pressure on retailers to manage multi-channel sales in full synchronization also increases considerably. Of course, this is no easy task. At the heart of the challenges lies the inadequacy of the technologies used by retailers to manage all channels in an integrated and holistic manner.

• Inconsistent sales management across channels
• The requirement that the data in all channels be the same up-to-date
• Mostly retailing, stock management, e-commerce, 3rd party warehousing and logistics, delivery processes and technologies are disconnected from each other.
• Inability to instantly reflect sales that develop through different channels to stock movements
• Confusion and repetitions in orders and customer data as a result of using different software and databases
• The troublesome and very costly integrating technologies that operate independently from each other are just some of the problems faced by retailers.

Traditional retailing systems, which are widely used in retailing today, do not seem likely to support omnichannel retailing. Moreover, the cost of expanding these software is very high. It is not an easy task to manage and integrate these applications, which use different infrastructures specially developed for different sales channels. At the heart of the work is the necessity of orchestrating all dimensions from a single point. This orchestration certainly requires very good, functional business software. How much your software will digitize you directly affects your success. Especially for the retail industry, some features and details that should not be skipped directly determine how your choice should be. Let's mention a few of them.

Can you manage products and categories suitable for the digital age?

Whether you have 1,000 or 100,000 different products, being able to manage products from a single center for store, field, dealer and online sales is a vital issue for retailers. You must now manage your products, which are expressed with a stock code in traditional software, together with images, videos, complementary products, incompatible products, and alternative product suggestions. The digital infrastructure you use should also have functions such as category-based pricing and storage so that your business can perform comprehensive category management.

Central stock management is critical to customer satisfaction.

It saves you from selling a product that does not work with real-time stock information and from a single center of all your sales points from the store to the e-commerce site, from the market to the field teams. At the same time, since all sales points work with centralized and real-time stock data, it also allows you to combine your order and delivery processes that run through different channels such as "online sales store delivery", "online sales store returns". In the rapidly changing and fiercely competitive world of the markets, you should be able to apply flexible price policies according to your channels with promotion and pricing tools. You should be able to define price lists, sales conditions, promotions, special discount rates for a person, institution, customer type, region, store, period, but most importantly, you should be able to manage all these from a single central system. These will be tools that will allow your sales to increase. As a result of these campaigns and efforts, you should be able to see and process your orders instantly.

You must have an ERP solution that offers you both e-commerce and B2B environments. 

In fact, we can say that a solution that allows multi-channel retailers to manage their business on the same platform while doing e-commerce is the most ideal solution. The solution to all the problems we have listed above lies in having a digital platform where you can manage all your operations and channels on a single and central database. While this platform manages all your processes from finance to purchasing at the background, it should allow you to design and manage all kinds of secure B2B portals and websites, not only for online sales, but also for your suppliers, dealers, account or contact customers. 

Another important point is that your solution is in a technological infrastructure where retail POS functions and cash registers, virtual and physical POS devices and applications, online payment systems, all devices that provide data for sales such as scales can be integrated into the system.  

Of course, the first condition for such a solution is to be web-based. Otherwise, it is impossible to bring together your stores, your customers on your online sales website, and your entire team in your head office, from product manager to purchase manager, on a single system.

In summary, in order to keep the speed, quality, success and customer satisfaction at the highest level in the new digital world order, retailers need systems designed to meet all their needs, which are designed in accordance with the requirements of the digital age, allow them to carry out all their processes, from receiving goods to checkout, their stores, online sales activities, relations and shopping with their suppliers, all on a single platform. 

So is it impossible to find such a solution? Definitely not. You should get to know Workcube and its capabilities to answer this question.