New Ideas for Clothing Retailing
When you've got plans for growth, you need strategies and process efficiencies. The items below from inside the industry will help to focus on what makes a difference.
- Having different systems for accounts, online ordering, stock movements, website and customer portals is costly, time consuming and requires too much duplicate data entry and checking. It needs to be much simpler.
- If I send a promotional email to my customers about our new product range, I want to see what sales were generated, what the profit margin was, and what customers purchased at the click of a button.
- Some customers don’t cope with backorder items, so I need to know my actual stock levels in real time. If a customer wants it now, I can’t afford to take an order for a product I don’t have in stock.
- I don’t have the budget to hire an IT person to manage in-house or complex integration pieces with other systems
- Large multinational software companies don’t respond to my needs, they can change the functionality at any time, and don’t offer personalised service/support.
- I cannot be everywhere at once and, while I trust my staff, I still need to be satisfied that appropriate controls, audit trails, and transaction logs are available to me.
- Having more than one branch/shop, requires me to have options for granular control over who can do what.
- When I transfer stock between branches, I need the system to show accountability as to who has done what and where it is.
- I need lots of flexibility with pricing. Whether it be special customers, loyalty programs, quantity break pricing, customer specific pricing or even pricing the same product differently at different branches, all must be possible.
- If I need to assemble a product, or include a manual labour component as part of the sale, the system needs to support this including tracking the progress of items due for assembly.
- I source products from a variety of suppliers and their prices change regularly. Updating my cost prices from multiple suppliers should be easy.
- If I choose to sell clothes via eBay, I should be able to select any items and have them published with the click of a button. I want all the accounting and reconciliation work associated with stock movements between eBay and my store to be seamless.
- I need to allow my customers to profile themselves via my website so that I know what products are of interest to them along with any that I should be stocking in future.
- My stock attributes include size, colour, brand, style and I need to be able to load new stock with ease.
- I want to be sure my customer’s information is held securely within Australia and that information isn’t used by anyone else.
