Retail operations are more than stock planning. It is an amalgamation of inventory, logistics, warehouse management, multichannel pricing management, integrating stores and orders across channels. Unless the pain points are recognised and addressed in these crucial functions, your retail business will keep suffering profit drainage and restricted growth irrespective of how big the retail industry is growing and how many opportunities galore.
It’s time to optimise your retail operations to leverage business growth and increase the footprint in the market.
The first thing that any retail business should ensure is consistent inventory.
Inventory visibility – is the chief contributor to retail success. To ensure round the year inventory visibility across multiple channels of sales, maintaining accurate inventory is necessary. The business should have a inventory management software system that automatically manages inventory levels and visibility. Optimising the fundamental and critical factor like inventory ensure business success.
Efficient order fulfilment – Pick pack and ship on time and intact is what makes your customer happy and wants to come back to you again and again. You cannot do that without gearing up and streamline how orders are managed and fulfilled till the last mile.
Warehouse planning – Lesser wastage of warehouse space is a great way to push your sales volume to the ceiling. Any retail needs to plan and store the inventory in warehouses intelligently, without unnecessary stocking up of a non-moving stock. Planning the warehouse space is critically important to ensure optimum stock availability and order fulfilment.
Scale up to the challenges of omnichannel – Establishing tandem between online and offline sales operations and order management is essential to any retail success. Since the market is moving towards omnichannel, efficient management of both physical and digital processes significantly contribute to the optimising of your retail business.
Seamless shopping experience – Plan your physical retail space to offer the enriching experience of shopping to your customers as an extension of the digital channel. Creating a seamless shopping experience that enables placing an order, paying as convenient, picking up the order from a preferred mode, returning on the most comfortable channel; accelerate the retail business growth many folds.
Cross-selling – of hit and the slacking stock is a smart way to ensure healthy stock rotation and its optimum level. Simultaneously it positively affects the productivity and profitability.
Unified marketing activities – Tailor the promotional activities taking into account your customers’ preferred shopping channels, their shopping pattern, season etc. The activity should have a specific motto to excite and drive the customers to your brand.
Let your data do more – How you handle the data from various channels almost instantly shows on your other retail activities. Analysing and taking action on the periodically generated data helps the businesses steer clear of the non-contributing, unprofitable channels, stock and operations.
Automation is the key – There are two ways to keep a tab on your data flow. One periodic audit of all the retail operations or automating the whole process of inventory, warehouse, orders, offline sales, sales promotional activities etc. Automation of operations not only gives you ample space to work-out your go-to-market strategies but utilises lesser resources to the fullest, increasing productivity.
So, here are some of the tips to optimise your retail operations. To know how best you can automate your operations so that you can focus on core activities of business development and management, check out Unicommerce – suit of e-commerce products.
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