We’ve already covered the big picture reasons to convert to wholesaling online. Now, let’s get detailed about the marketing areas where your business can grow if you start using wholesaling software.
Sales orders, purchase orders, and invoices
In a non-digital B2B world... When a customer places an order, you create a sales order to be used by various people from accounting to fulfillment. When you purchase products or supplies, you create a purchase order. All these orders, along with their status, need to be invoiced and sent on to the departments to keep track of that vital information, including finance, warehouses, and shipping.
None of this changes when you move your wholesale operations to an online platform, but here’s what does...
How quickly these sales and purchase orders are created and how easily they can be distributed to various departments.
A status of a sales order changes in real-time. For example, when a product has gone from the packed to shipped stage.
This all boils down to the fact that you could be saving a lot of time, reducing a lot of manual work and improving the accuracy of the entire process.
Order fulfillment
If you fulfill in house, you can be sure your warehouse is using updated inventory information and sales orders. Coordinating with a third-party provider, you’ll quickly see the advantage of real-time updates: improved communication, more transparency, and a reduction in processing errors.
Sales reps out in the field
Moving online empowers your sales reps out on the road and their workflows:
Accessing up-to-date information and better product information and catalogs.
Improving communication and connectivity between sales reps and yourself.
Up-to-date information on inventory ensures that sales reps aren’t out selling goods that aren’t available to be sold.
If you extend your online operations to a mobile application, you can make the sales process even easier.
No more carrying along stacks of catalogs. And, if a rep wants to close a sale quickly and easily on the road or at a tradeshow, a mobile app let’s them do it.
Consolidating wholesale channels
If you wholesale from multiple touchpoints, for example, through several sales reps, a warehouse, and online, you’ll be able to consolidate all this data, and quickly communicate amongst all areas, rather than waiting for manual updates and meetings. This simplifies workflows by making them more accurate, eliminating what used to be lots of errors in overselling, understocking and selling stock that was already accounted for.
Autonomy amongst employees
With all the information now stored in one place, employees don’t have to wait for a handover from other departments to get the data they need to do their job right. For example, your warehouse manager in Australia doesn’t have to wait for a manual update from your warehouse manager in Indonesia.
Rather, having all your information on an online platform means warehouse managers can pull up the report they need, not having to wait for the other data to come along. With that autonomy comes more knowledge about the state of the business and — with it — better, faster, more accurate decisions.
Expansion
Whether it’s adding an international warehouse or just adding even more sales teams, expansion while online means, very simply, that your system can handle it. Without much effort at all, you can:
Add suppliers to your vendor list
Process larger orders
Move goods between warehouses
Growing your B2B eCommerce business doesn’t have to be complicated or take years to do. What does help, is knowing the most efficient and cost-effective ways to do it, along with the key metrics and KPIs you should pay attention to.
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