Top benefits of using a multichannel ecommerce platform for your business

Today, consumers are no longer satisfied with only an online experience. Instead, they want fluidity between all the channels available and between all their devices whenever they make their purchases, look at reviews, compare products and receive their products and/or services. This behavior is compelling retailers to make their brand’s presence robust, optimized for and active on multiple channels. A multichannel ecommerce platform empowers retailers to offer a unified, consistent customer experience across all the channels.

However, keeping everything synchronized is quite an uphill task from different perspectives – from inventory management, and product information, to order fulfillment and shipping logistics. Trying to attain it all alone or with a dedicated team can increase the overhead of merchants. To enable merchants focus solely on their business development, a multichannel ecommerce platform which simplifies omnichannel ecommerce and consumer engagement can serve as an important tool. And when you put your trust in a highly scalable and secure multi-channel selling software like the one offered by eChannelHub, you will be empowered with greater agility to effortlessly handle changing conditions, and leverage flexible integrations with top third-party apps along the scope of continuous innovation.

If you’re still in a dilemma about whether to opt for multichannel ecommerce platform, here’re some key benefits of using one.

Top benefits

Improves conversion rate

A multichannel ecommerce platform offers you more sales avenues, which means visibility of your brand becomes significantly improved together with the scope of exploring a wide array of market areas. This would help you to attract more prospective consumers and thus, increase your sales. It also provides you with different opportunities of upselling – from everyday essential to an impulse purchase, to displaying customized recommendations – all of which would add to your bottom-line.

Boosts customer loyalty

In today’s hectic life, consumers want to be able to make purchases while being engaged in other activities and on the go. Multi-channel selling software lets you offer a more integrated, seamless customer experience across diverse sales channels. It also allows you to offer varied customer support channels – from social media, and live chat to email and phone – all of which will reward you with increased customer loyalty in terms of better reviews and more procurements.

Expands reach

When you expand your market presence through a multichannel order management system, your customer reach becomes much bigger, thus helping you to increase your mass market distribution. Even if you’re a small merchant, by taking advantage of the huge reach of giants like Amazon, you can place your product and/or service in front of a much wider range of prospective customers. With simple fulfillment and checkout processes offered by multi-channel selling software, this extra exposure would gradually lead to more revenue.

Diversifies risk

A multichannel ecommerce platform protects you against the risks of relying on a solitary sales medium. In the event of one of your accounts getting suspended or one sales avenue losing momentum, a multi channel product listing software helps you sustain on your other channels by diversifying the risk.

Helps you gather insightful data

When you have several sales avenues, they help you to collect a wide range of data about your customers, using which you can develop a detailed profile of your entire target audience. Things like their purchasing history, demographic, time zone, location, devices they use to shop, interests etc are crucial insights that a multichannel listing software enables you to gather and analyze. All this information would greatly help you to accurately develop your sales strategy and marketing campaigns to boost your conversion rate.

Improves inventory transparency

Using a multichannel inventory control software,  you can centralize the data of all your channels, systems and branches. It means you can monitor the inventory of a certain product across all of its stocking locations. It brings you two key benefits. First, if, for instance, you see a default shipping location isn’t optimal, you can determine the next cheapest location to ship from, in order to save on shipping costs. Second, if an order for an out-of-stock product is placed, you can check with every warehouse to see if it could be delivered from an alternate location, saving that sale that would be lost otherwise.

Improves demand sensing

Each year, overstocks cost businesses across the globe to a good extent. Overstocking mainly happens because of improper buying and planning decisions that arise out of poor forecasting and data collection. A multichannel inventory control software makes you able to see every performance and sales data from all your channels. It leads to more accurate sales forecasts and perfect inventory management – all of which lead to improved performance of your business.

Decreases errors

Think of the mistakes you’ve made in your business, and how hard or tricky they were to fix. Now, consider how much easier it would be to avoid all that mess in the first place. By using an inventory management system software, you’re allowing a machine to deal with the workload. Thus, it simply takes a large chunk of substantial human errors out of the scenario.

Integrates communication and analytics

Meeting customers’ needs plays a crucial role in increasing the ROI of any business and a multichannel ecommerce platform helps you understand it accurately. Apart from creating different streams of information through multiple channels of communication, it also provides you with valuable analytics that enable you to understand and quantify needs of your customers. With this communication and analytics, you can interact with consumer data more efficiently and address their needs to give your conversion rates a big boost.

Helps you integrate your business

A multi-channel selling software lets you integrate different aspects of your business like merchandising, inventory, sales, customer service, and enterprise resource planning. Instead of disparate segments of your business, every aspect works together to provide top quality product and/or service to the customers, thus helping you increase your bottom-line.

Adds convenience for the customers

Some consumers always look for the lowest price, which is the sole deciding factor when buying online. At the same time, there’re consumers who’re willing to pay slightly more for the convenience of dealing with businesses that offer excellent customer service, fast shipping and simple return policies. When you make things simpler for consumers through a reliable multichannel ecommerce platform, they’ll come back and purchase more from you.

Wrapping it up

Using a multichannel ecommerce platform is a strategy that benefits you, your consumers and your bottom-line. It may seem a little overwhelming in the beginning, when you take the first step to expand your business to multiple channels. There’re a lot of variables and moving parts to consider – Which channels will work the best for you? What will suit your customers the best? How will you manage the increased data and inventory needs? The reality is, with a little management, you can reap the advantages of using a multi-channel selling software to the optimum. You would almost always experience a larger customer base, higher visibility, and obviously, increased sales. Diversification of selling channels has become immensely crucial these days, not because it’s the current buzz in the industry, but because that’s the way consumers across the globe are shopping today.

So, why let your competitors’ race ahead when all you need to do is to take the advantages that a multichannel ecommerce platform brings your way? For more information about our multi-channel selling software and how EChannelHub can help you to scale up your business and boost revenue, contact us today.