Getting started in ecommerce presents entrepreneurs with many types of challenges. Starting with which products to sell, how to price them and how to handle inventories to whether to offer your customers different product customization options. This time around we have once again roamed the world wide web to pick you 6 helpful apps and services to make your inventory and product management related routines just a tad easier.
Keep inventory in sync with multiple sale locations
Let’s say you are otherwise a seasoned entrepreneur but are just branching out to ecommerce as an add-on to your brick and mortar store. With active sales on both fronts, physical inventory management has presented quite a challenge so far. Stock Sync by Cloud Coder can help you bring order to your messy, split up inventory. Stock Sync integrates with your external inventory or warehouse management system or the inventories of your suppliers and partners and periodically syncs the relevant stock quantities and prices between the systems. That ensures you can service your clients with the confidence of the products availability and up-to-date pricing. Stock Sync support multiple file formats (CSV, XLS, XML and JSON) and a variety of communication channels (FTP, URL, Google Spreadsheet & Drive, Dropbox and email).
Optimize stock levels
Inventory planning is something that, already by the sound of it, seems complex. How can you plan in a way that allows you to minimize money tied up in inventory, but at the same time, make sure you have enough product to satisfy your customers’ needs at any given point in time. The correct answer here is – with a proper planning solution. Inventory Planner will provide you with sales forecasts based on your current stock and sales so you are always on top of your game. Based on that forecast, Inventory Planner will automatically create purchase orders to make sure you will always have enough. This is planning magic.
In the rare event you do run out of certain stock even after giving our first two app suggestions a try, you would still want to keep those customers tied to your store. Back in Stock will let your customers sign up for back in stock email alerts, so you can still make that sale once your stock replenishment has arrived. Currently available for Shopify and SEOshop, Back in Stock is the tool of choice to help you retain your sale even in case you run out.
Increase sales by really showing off your products
If pictures really are worth a thousand words, then imagine what video can do. It is proven that video increases sales tremendously. However, videos are usually expensive to produce. Dynavi
is like your personal videographer, automatically creating product videos for boosting sales. The way it does this is by automatically collecting product information from your ecommerce platform. On the basis of its found materials (images, sentences, videos etc), Dynavi will generate a product video equipped with everything to make that sale. Your videos are then automatically included in your store, uploaded to Youtube and will even get a boost in search engine visibility.
Dynavi team has recently come up with another masterpiece: Thank you video which similarly to their main product automatically creates custom videos but this time they are created for your new or returning customers after a sale has happened to offer that personal touch with an act of appreciation.
Expand your reach with product customization
Product customization options are scarce on Shopify. It is very time consuming to create variants of products and many just opt for limiting their product catalogue. Unlimited Product Options by Only Growth will add this functionality to your online shop with a click of a few buttons. UPL will bypass Shopify’s default limit of 100 variants and 3 options and let you create 500 000+ variants with no difficulties. Custom colour swatches, custom optional fields and multi-language labels are just a few features of UPL. As an added benefit, it comes with built-in dynamic pricing for product variants – a benefit that is usually time-consuming to use.
These were our picks in April to help you optimize your inventories, maximize your sales and make the most out of extra revenue possibilities of your ecommerce venture. As always – we hope you find time to give these solutions a test-drive and see what works for you.
We will be back with more interesting app picks for you in a few weeks.
Printout Designer enables you to create invoices, packing slips, labels and other printouts with a truly customized look, independent of the e-commerce platform you use. You can customize every aspect of your business document creation process without wasting countless hours. Read more about Printout Designer from printoutdesigner.com
Sven has a background in communication with 10+ years of experience. At Printout Designer he makes sure our messages are short, simple and to the point. On our blog he writes mostly on ecommerce and related topics, but occasionally likes to take a sidestep into other realms of life aswell.
