Since March 2020 the face of online retail has changed fundamentally.
There are so many changes to that particular sector, that particular market. As well as the pandemic, there are all sorts of other things that have clicked into place.
We’ve potentially been gearing up to this for not just the last 10 months, but the five or six years before that with the growth of e-commerce.
Regardless of whether you work in B2C or B2B, I think to be successful in this day and age, you need to have some sort of online retail element.
In B2B that can look different, it doesn’t necessarily have to be a fully-fledged checkout process, but you do still need to provide some kind of online e-commerce/ordering/portal functionality in order to be successful. It’s just becoming such an accepted part of a user experience that why wouldn’t you do it?
Having an online presence isn’t the easiest thing in the world. But there are so many very good platforms around. You only need to look at Shopify and BigCommerce to see that’s what they’re there for, that’s what they specialize in. You can spin up a very sophisticated, very good looking Shopify site in less than a week.
Business innovation
One of the most gratifying things over the last 10 months is just seeing how innovative businesses have been. In terms of retail, for example, coffee shops have had some kind of additional revenue stream of selling accessories, selling direct to consumer, having subscriptions, selling gift cards and vouchers, and more.
We’ve welcomed a lot of new customers, and our existing customer base has also seen an opportunity to grow its online presence, too.
Some have seen an increase in sales and revenue, while others have fundamentally changed their business models or added extra revenue streams. Though this was somewhat forced by the pandemic, why not continue it, if you can gear up?
There are all sorts of other contributing factors, too. There’s a huge increase in places not accepting cash, and that’s because there are not as many people going shopping. People don’t want to handle cash for the obvious (Covid-safety) reasons, but also the high street banks are closing, so retailers, restaurants, coffee shops and other B2C high-street businesses are finding it increasingly difficult to handle cash.
Cloud Ecosystem
Stream operates within an existing and ever-growing cloud ecosystem.
We’ve got integrations with various business systems. So it might be warehouse management, it might be order management, it might be an ERP, it might be a finance package.
We are very much part of the ecosystem. And when you start looking at Shopify, for instance, that ecosystem’s huge. You can very quickly and easily plug in a number of other business systems to enable you to be successful. So whether it might be Xero or Quickbooks for accounting, it might be a point-of-sale and a card system.
Depending on how you’re operating, if you’ve got lots and lots of different channels. So it might be a bricks-and-mortar shop. It might be your e-commerce store. You might be selling through various marketplaces.
You have to have the right systems in place to make sure that you know what stock’s in place. You want to avoid stock-outs by making sure that you know what stock’s available, and that you’re not showing on your website that something’s available when it’s not.
Especially in this day and age where it can be increasingly difficult to get hold of stock due to things like supply-chain issues and Brexit putting pressure on the supply chain.
There’s plenty of systems out there that can help you manage your inventory, your ordering, your shipping, like Brightpearl, Veeqo, or Mintsoft.
It’s relatively simple to plug into couriers, like UPS and Parcelforce, but the complexities start to come in when you have your own vehicles to do those deliveries.
It’s making sure that you put the right items onto the right vehicles at the right time, and planning those in the most efficient way, making sure that you’ve told your end-customer when you’re coming and what to expect, make sure that you can collect your proof-of-delivery.
And in some respects, you know, maybe it’s more important, if there are any issues, to manage that customer service aspect of redeliveries and expectations of those. If margins are tight on deliveries, if somebody’s not in, then you can charge them for those redeliveries and prove where and when you were delivering.
It’s that cloud ecosystem concept that is really important.
Regardless of who you are and what you’re doing, relatively quickly and easily, you can have a good, sophisticated online presence and sell through multiple channels, open up new market opportunities. That does create complexities, but they can be managed efficiently and effectively with other systems that you can plugin.