Empower Your Business with Cloud ERP for Retailers

The world of retail is not what it used to be for businesses or customers since the inception and explosion of online shopping. Customers want to buy from their favorite brands through multiple channels, expecting lightning-quick fulfillment times and top-notch customer service. While multichannel sales can drive tremendous growth for your business, they can also present a huge challenge for businesses seeking a smooth customer experience with an outdated business management system. 

 Designed by Freepik

At AcuPower, we’ve seen firsthand how modern tools like Acumatica, the cloud ERP, can empower business growth with an effective online presence and reduced manual processes. Having Acumatica function as the single source of truth for everything from inventory to finance means that each of your sales channels is a true extension of your business rather than individual data silos.

In this article, we will explore how Acumatica’s Retail-Commerce Edition supports retailers competing in a multichannel market.  


 

Improved B2C Experience

A: eCommerce Integration

Is your team currently relying on manual data entry across your systems? Acumatica’s bidirectional sync with your online store prevents this duplicate entry process and eliminates errors. Seamlessly communicate product information and pricing, along with live inventory, from your ERP to your website without any re-entry. 

Likewise, your eCommerce site will be able to communicate customer information, orders, and payment back into your ERP. Not only will this save you time, but it will also make sure all information is consistent between your platforms. Perhaps most importantly, your customers will always have reliable information while visiting your store.

Acumatica has a history of successfully integrating with the major players in eCommerce, including Shopify, BigCommerce, and Magento, among others. Are you interested in learning more? If so, please watch our short video below.

B: Discounts and Promotions

It is essential to have flexibility in pricing. Acumatica gives you flexible pricing options with the ability to set and manage discounts and promotional prices. It’s easy to define discount percentages and effective dates within the ERP, as well as price break points to incentivize more sales. While this flexibility is important, consistency between your eCommerce site and the ERP is just as crucial. 

C: Automated Customer Notifications

Customers want information about their orders, and they want it fast. This includes order and shipment confirmation notifications. They expect to have visibility into what they spend their money on, so it is important to make it easy for your customers to be updated in real-time on their order and shipment status. Instead of manually emailing tracking numbers or relying on your customers to log in to their accounts, you can leverage the range of automated notification types and delivery methods that Acumatica supports to keep your customers satisfied without adding any workload to your sales or service team.

Amazon

Managing your eCommerce site with tight integration to your ERP is a game-changer, but we realize that your website is probably not the only place you sell online since more and more merchants are utilizing marketplaces like Amazon. In fact, it’s estimated that over half of all customers start their online shopping journey on Amazon, not including those who will later use Amazon to compare price and quality with what they find elsewhere.

Acumatica lets you take complete advantage of Amazon’s fulfillment capacities without sacrificing any visibility into your business. FBA and FBM orders can flow back into your ERP as invoices or orders, so you always have accurate views of your sales and inventory data no matter where the sale takes place. With the ability to integrate with both your website and Amazon, you can be sure that your customers can always find you and that you’ll be able to meet their needs.

Are you selling on other channels as well? Our team at AcuPower can use our experience to leverage Acumatica’s integration capabilities to connect your additional marketplaces to the ERP! Please get in touch with us so we can learn more about your goals and needs.

Streamlined B2B Sales

If you sell to businesses as well as consumers, you are most likely already familiar with the challenges that are presented by B2B sales. Customer requests for inventory status, sales quotes, and bulk discounts can take up exorbitant amounts of time for your sales team to answer. This is especially true if your sales team needs to go through another person, like a warehouse manager, for answers to common questions, or wait for a daily spreadsheet export to see updated inventory information. These delays, unfortunately,  can lead to lost sales.

With Acumatica’s customer portal, you can provide your B2B customers with answers to their most common questions and enable them to place orders directly into your ERP completely unassisted. The customer portal allows a limited view into your ERP so that customers can view their specific pricing, order history, and open balances, alongside current inventory levels. With a B2B portal, you can eliminate many of the obstacles that businesses typically face when ordering from you, supporting a streamlined sales process that results in lower labor costs and higher profit margins.

Whether sales come from your eCommerce site, via Amazon, EDI, through a customer portal, or even over the phone or email, Acumatica lets you view and manage all of your orders in one place. More than that, the enhanced shipping and WMS functionality offered will doubtlessly improve and speed up your order fulfillment. See our video below on Acumatica’s native shipping capabilities.

Point of Sale

Although online shopping continues to grow, some customers still enjoy shopping the traditional way. If you require a point-of-sale solution for your business, our team at Acupower can help you evaluate Acumatica’s native POS, as well as integrations with other solutions such as Fusion POS and Shopify POS. With a fully integrated POS system alongside an integrated eCommerce experience, there will be zero gaps in your sales and inventory data! 

Being able to easily connect to other essential hardware like cash registers and receipt printers means your store employees will be equipped for every kind of transaction, including returns, with immediate access to information such as customer and order history, real-time order status, and inventory data.

Conclusion

We want to be clear: Acumatica ERP is more than just an order management system. At its core, Acumatica offers powerful accounting technology that is certain to save your finance team endless hours. While your customers will be delighted with an improved shopping experience across all of your channels, your finance team will be just as thrilled to see all of those orders and inventory transactions automatically flow back into the same database for accounting purposes. 

Acumatica is a modern cloud ERP that was built so you can future-proof your business. If you are currently struggling with a lack of integration between your ERP and eCommerce site or navigating the multichannel market without a single source of truth for your data, we would love to speak with you and learn more about your needs.