It’s a big online retail world out there. With marketplaces like Amazon accounting for nearly 45% of all online retail sales, cross-channel sellers need to have a balanced system of attack to stay in the game and remain competitive. Given that one-off sales holidays like Amazon Prime Day now dominate, and do over half a billion in sales in a single day, it’s easy to get lost in the mix as an online retailer. But it doesn’t have to all be a guessing game. In fact, there are ways that you can gain the competitive advantage by using the benefits of ecommerce CRM software to make headway and post solid gains. We’ll give you a complete look at how this software is revolutionizing the online retail approach, so you can decide if it’s a smart move to add it to your e-tail business model.
How Ecommerce CRM Software Improves Your Online Business Model
Newer to the ecommerce world is CRM. Now, CRM has been around for decades, but it never was really designed to service online retailers. Much has changed in recent years, however, and online selling has become a far more complex and highly competitive hemisphere. As a result, the majority of retailers are listing their wares on multiple selling channels to make the most of each sales opportunity. Commonly, a retailer will sell on their website or shopping cart as well as cross-listing items on marketplaces like Amazon, eBay, Jet, Rakuten, Alibaba, Etsy and others. Keeping track of this cross-channel data used to be nearly impossible until the advent of ecommerce CRM. Here are a few ways that it helps you grow your online business and improve your customer loyalty and retention.
Solving the Cross-Channel Conundrum
Cross channel selling is nothing new to ecommerce. But the reality is that most of these sales channels don’t talk to each other. For example, if you are selling on Amazon, it won’t communicate data with your Shopify shopping cart, leaving you to guess or manually compare numbers and reports to compile information. But with newer ecommerce CRM software, you can keep on task because it integrates with your marketplaces and shopping cart to consolidate data. What’s more, it imports this order data and then generates detailed and robust, data-rich customer profiles, helping you track each order, shipment, return and inventory movement with ease, in real-time and with a vast array of reporting and customer service tools that are designed to help you improve your bottom line.
Learning Your Customers’ Habits
Another way that retailers benefit from ecommerce CRM is by being able to finally learn their customer habits. What’s great is that CRM software for ecommerce helps you improve website profitability because it tracks each customer, learns what they buy, what they return and what their shipping preferences are, and then reports it back into a large database and graphical user interface (dashboard). This helps you identify what items are trending, what is being returned and why, and the most common shipping preference. You can then take this data and create newsletters and promotional campaigns that are targeted to the specific customers who are going to buy the most and return the least. You can also determine what inventory items need to go, and which ones you need to stock up on. These are but a few examples of how this software helps turbo boost your profit margins.
Reducing Returns & Out of Stocks
Returns are just a cost of doing business. In fact, reports suggest that about 30% of all online orders are ultimately returned by consumers. Out of stocks also plague retailers and result in lost revenue streams. But both of these issues can be resolved with the right ecommerce CRM in place. By learning the reasons of returns, and by knowing what inventory historically trends and when, you can make changes in advance to reduce returns, eliminate bad or high returned inventory and stock up on the hot sellers that make you the most money.
Improving Customer Service
Your customer service model greatly improves with ecommerce CRM as well, and is another way that this software helps you improve your business. With the right software in place, you’ll automatically have access to the customer’s profile, order history and more when they call in. This empowers your customer service team to deliver a white-gloved experience, reduce wait time, add account notes and provide better service overall. Happy customers are ones who become repeat and loyal buyers, and are the very backbone of your entire retail model.
Creating Effective Team Management
Newer CRM software for ecommerce comes with a built-in task list and calendar. This feature connects each user and helps streamline the efforts of your entire team. Team members have the ability to create tasks, tag other members, attached files and add notes – all the while being able to also set dates within a universal and shared internal calendar. As you can imagine, this creates a new level of accountability and helps your entire company stay on task while improving business efficiency exponentially.
Streamlining Shipping & Returns
Finally, the leading ecommerce CRM solutions also offer premium plugins that add shipping and returns software to the equation. Now customers can place a return by simply visiting your website and processing it, while the CRM learns the reason for the return, updates the customer’s profile and tracks the return shipment. What’s more, a shipping plugin lets you import orders, compare the lowest shipping rates and generate shipping labels so you can get your packages out the door faster, all the while updating each corresponding customer profile with shipping information, tracking number and order data.
As you can see, there is a lot to gain from adding this software to your business model. You will want to take your time when choosing the ecommerce CRM system that’s right for your online store. Make sure you spend time comparing features and functions between the leading providers. Conduct some due diligent and you’ll be able to reap the benefits of this software for years to come.