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Saving Money and Time With Vendor Integrations

December 7, 2018 / 5 minute read / By Michele Salerno

Learn how vendor integrations can help you grow your business.

We all know that manual product entry into your POS software is a time-consuming and tedious task. Moreover, it’s tiring, so there’s likely to be errors showing up from time to time—as typos, misspellings, etc.—and then additional time is needed to review for those errors within your POS database.

Integrating vendor catalogs into your point of sale will eliminate the need to perform these tedious tasks; allowing retailers to save time and improve their relationships with their vendors. Retailers can use the vendor’s product images and descriptions, which are included in the catalog data feed, as well as ensuring vendor’s newest products make it to their shelves faster.

Vendor integration can also enable automated purchasing, which allows for faster turnover and fulfillment. With online vendor inventory feeds, available inventory levels and updated pricing can be automatically reflected on the retailer’s E-Commerce website. Then, when online orders are placed by customers, drop shipping can be enabled directly from the vendor with the retailer’s company branding

Getting Rid of Shortage and Surplus with Automating POs

One of the biggest problems that retailers face is inventory management. If you have a shortage of a product and it goes out-of-stock then consumers would simply go find another retailer, resulting in you losing customers and revenue.

Now with automated purchase orders, you can avoid the hassle of out-of-stock. By setting min/max (minimum and maximum) inventory limits within your point of sale, the retail system will conveniently order more of the products when it approaches the minimum limit and avoid ordering more than the maximum limit you set, so you won’t have to worry about having a shortage or surplus of products.

Moreover, the retail system does streamline ordering via EDI, so you won’t have to worry about products arriving late due to unrecognizable handwriting on forms or wrong shipping addresses given. Automated purchase order processing cuts delivery times and saves shipping and stocking costs for the retailer, allowing them to offer and sell more products faster. And that means the vendor will also sell more, resulting in a mutually beneficial relationship.

Live Online Vendor Feeds Display Available Quantity on Hand and MSRP

With live online vendor inventory feeds, your supplier’s available inventory levels and current MSRP’s are automatically reflected on your E-Commerce website. The live vendor feeds showing QOH can help put the consumers at ease by showing them items you still have in “your” inventory. We all know the feeling of seeing the last product in stock and the urge to buy it before it’s gone.

This is especially true for limited edition products that might never get restocked again. By displaying your vendors’ inventory levels on your website, you can sell more products, without having to stock the merchandise in your store!

Advancements in Drop Shipping

In the past—just right when e-commerce started—drop shipping was infamous for its uncertainty. After all, different vendors all have different ways of shipping. Now fast forward to the present, it is time for the advent of drop shipping—like a phoenix rising from its ash—drop shipping is now better than ever with the recent advancements. With drop shipping, you can now have access to more products in stock without the stress of having surplus inventory.

In the past with drop shipping, customers would never find out a product is out of stock because the order from the customer to the retailer is then sent from the retailer to the vendor. If the vendor doesn’t have the item in stock, then they have to wait for it replenish while the customer is kept waiting in the dark with no feedback.

Fast forward to the present day, customers can now, thankfully, see exactly how many items are in stock and available to ship (from your vendor). All of this and as far as your customer knows- the order is coming from you, their trusted retailer.

Tracking Vendor Performance

Retailers face numerous decisions in choosing vendors: Does the vendor offer drop shipping? Do they integrate their product catalogs with the retailer’s POS software? Do they offer automated purchasing? Then retailers also have to consider if an item is going to sell better in-store or online; and then how many of the items should they order. With so many factors to consider, vendor integrations can help minimize the stress.

Retailers should use reporting to see which sales came from which vendors. Having the ability to sort and display sales information in various ways can help retailers see how well each vendor is doing. Using advanced reporting tools and vendor scorecards can help retailers better manage their vendors. They can track compliance issues, spot trends and monitor vendor performance to help them optimize their supply chain and maximize profit.

Are you getting the most out of your vendors?

Learn how you can leverage your vendors and offer a wider variety of products on your website, automate POs, and have your customer’s orders fulfilled faster- directly by your vendors.

Read about the five ways retailers can automate their business by integrating with their suppliers.

Or watch our software in action.

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