By Ruth Richter • August 07, 2019
If one of the big ideas behind ecommerce is to simplify how you sell your products to customers, you might wonder why in the world anyone would want to make their ecommerce more complicated by running multiple online storefronts.
There are actually several valid reasons for doing so, from diversifying your brand to increasing your customer base to improving the customer experience. But even with all those benefits, managing multiple ecommerce sites at once can be a major challenge. Data and user experiences must all remain separate and distinct, even if the products are all housed under and shipped from the same location. The good news is that the complexity can be overcome.
Just like every brick and mortar store needs a solid foundation to construct the building where you’ll sell your goods, having multiple ecommerce storefronts requires laying the right groundwork to minimize headaches and maximize the opportunities for success.
Get the Right PIM On Board
PIM—or product information management—is the set of processes and tools that give ecommerce retailers a single place to collect and manage product information, create the product catalog, and distribute to the right ecommerce channels. With PIM, you can easily manage your ecommerce product and service data in one centralized platform. This scalable solution makes it easy to expand to more sales channels such as Amazon and eBay.
Optimize Data for Search
If you are using multiple ecommerce storefronts to accommodate different languages, it’s especially important to know the terms your customers are using to search for what they need. If product descriptions don’t align with the most popular search terms, the right customers won’t be able to find what they need on your site and will click off to another site.
Centralize Inventory and Order Management
Even though your ecommerce storefronts may each have their own individual look and feel, you’re still operating out of a single, centralized company for inventory and order management. Minimize your headaches by keeping inventory centralized in an ERP or other central point. You’ll thank yourself later when you only have to review one master set of inventory information rather than three or four separate reports.
It’s the same with order management. Despite each web storefront’s differences, keep the order management and fulfillment processes the same. Standardizing across your brands maintains efficiency and profitability that you won’t find if you manage orders within each individual ecommerce storefront.
Integrate and Standardize with IN-SYNCH®
Managing multiple web stores doesn’t have to be intimidating. Integration applications such as IN-SYNCH by ROI Consulting are built to help centralize all the necessary information on inventory, orders, customers, products, and any other data you need to collect and analyze from across multiple ecommerce sites. By providing real-time data synchronization across multiple ecommerce platforms, third party carts, Sage ERPs, and more, IN-SYNCH automatically solves the majority of the pain points of running multiple online stores. Whether that’s providing tracking and shipping information, customer-specific pricing, or connecting inventory on one item to multiple ecommerce sites that sell it, IN-SYNCH integration is up to the task. Implement a standard integration or customize for the most complex situations.
Ready to integrate your ecommerce storefronts in a way that won’t have you running for the aspirin bottle? Let us know here, or call 402-934-2223, 1.
