The biggest challenge that the New Year is posing toward retails, eCommerce, and to global merchants is managing the expectations of customers in all aspects from onsite to online shopping, customer experience to global shipping, etc. At the same time, it is putting pressure on the retailer in managing multiple stores efficiently. In this regard only unified Point-of-Sales and a unified store management system can help i.e. Odoo POS, Odoo Inventory, Odoo Warehouse, etc. because it brings data on multiple stores, including products, inventory status, purchase, sales, and customers to a single dashboard, which makes multiple store management easy for the merchant from a single dashboard. Moreover, one can manage key store operations from an online dashboard too.
Here in this article, we have provided a detailed analysis of challenges that have been raised by 2022, and the solution offered by Odoo. Along with this, we have discussed the benefits offered by customized Odoo CRM & Odoo ERP solutions rendered by Odoo partners.
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What Makes Multiple Store Management Difficult
The difficult thing for all merchants is to manage a franchise. However, things have become quite difficult since the customer has been shifted to online purchasing. Imagine the magnitude of difficulty for the businesses in managing the onsite store while ensuring all orders are delivered timely. Apart from this, a merchant also has to deal with keeping track of the coupons and onsite or online only sales. All of these and many more challenges have been raised by the technological evolution, some of them are mentioned below.
- Purchase & Sale Reconciliation – When you are dealing with digital store management and stock optimization, the worst challenge is to keep the data organized, and distinguish between products ordered and sale-out. This process is commonly known as reconciliation, and the process of manual reconciliation is more difficult than automated.
- Unconnected Inventory & Warehouse – Another challenge posed by the manual store management is not having a clear picture of products availability, trend, and the need to update the inventory.
- Order, Inventory, Product, System Integrations – In addition to the inventory management, the need for having a system that tracks and processes orders, keeps track of product availability and ensures the system remains agile to support the needs of businesses. Alongside this, the ‘Digital Distribution’ of products and goods is among the rising challenges. Imagine you have a request to fulfill an order but the stock is too low to comply with the customer’s request. In this regard having a system that supports drop-shipping becomes essential. Moreover, technology is evolving minute by minute, and this means the tech-stack a company or business is using can not remain current if the necessary upgrades and updates are not made. Thus, another challenge for businesses is Finding And Keeping Technology Updated to ensure the product are displayed in delivered to the right customer at right time.
- Storing Customer Information And Database – Last but not least, the online shopping trend has created opportunities for businesses to keep the data on customers current and when the insights are shared with the right team the results are proven to be worthwhile. But, keep track of customer data, maintaining a historical archive or all customer activities, based on their behavior.
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2 Ways Odoo Can Help in Multi-Store Management
Odoo POS
It is one of the applications offered by Odoo, that is designed to manage payments e.g. online and offline, process check-out, identify loyalty cards, offer discounts and process personalized coupons, manage multiple stores, and point of sales from a single dashboard. In addition to this, it allows one to track products, manage product categories, and keep the store website updated with relevant information and much more.
In addition to what we have mentioned above, Odoo POS is thriving to become a single platform that can help a business manage every onsite and online business operation from a single window. This mean, you can add online payment methods, allow the customer to utilize multiple payment methods to pay an invoice, monitor cash flow, and purchase flow, monitor and refill the inventory or a particular store based on the sales reports, market trends, and much more, Lastly, you can manage the entire floor plan of a physical store i.e., a restaurant right from the POS, process orders, etc.
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Odoo Inventory
Another application that Odoo offers for key store operations is Odoo Inventory. It is a SaaS application that allows one to manage every product from supplier till the delivery to the customer with a double-entry inventory. In addition to this, you can access this app from any device e.g., laptop, mobile, smartphone, etc. And, it can perform all basic operations ranging from delivery order to inventory adjustment, scanning the bar-codes of product, keeping the track of information change. Besides, you can set the customized workflow to track the product in any store, and set auto-replenishment rule to keep inventory full whenever a certain festival starts or product is being purchased. This is also knowns as forecasting. Last but not least, the advanced feature of this is it empowers businesses to leverage drop-shipping, cross-docking, pick-pack-ship options, and multiple warehouses and stock management with utmost ease. Besides, you can get Odoo inventory integrated with other in-house applications ranging from accounting to purchase, sales to shipping connector, and Odoo Quality.
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Benefits offered by Odoo Multiple Store management
- Optimize Site, Product, Inventory
- Central Market Place & Store Management
- Real-Time Inventory Update
- Comprehensive Product Information System
- Auto-Replenishment With Forecasting & Reporting
Conclusion
Managing a single store that is running locally is easier to comprehend. But as a business grow and expand, the challenge diversifies. Some of the key challenges faced by the businesses involved managing the inventory of multiple stores, keeping information on available inventory synchronized with the system, reducing the purchase and sale reconciliation error, and much more. With Odoo POS and Odoo Inventory, you can manage more than one store, allocate products, inventory, payment, and purchases from a single dashboard. However, the key is getting the application customized to match your uniques business process. And, in this regard, you can get assistance from certified Odoo Partners i.e. Techloyce. Contact Today!
