6 Essential Things You Should Look at While Choosing an Omnichannel Platform
The retail industry is being disrupted, and the rise of omnichannel platforms is completely redefining it. They allow consumers to interact with retailers through various channels, such as in-store, online, mobile devices, chatbots, & more, giving shoppers complete control over how they shop.
Retail businesses gain excellent insights into customer behaviour across all channels and make more informed decisions about how to best serve their customers. Retailers are overwhelmed with options when choosing the right omnichannel platform. Choosing the right one can be difficult, but a few critical factors can help make the decision easier for them.
1) Enables you to sell from any channel
Multichannel retail brands can sell products on physical & digital channels but can’t interconnect & monitor their inventories on them. That’s why it is challenging to get a single-view inventory for all channels. Another big issue is that they can’t sell products in a brick-and-mortar store using online channels or use online stores to pick up products in-store.
These limitations create friction between different channels or touchpoints and deny a seamless shopping experience to the customers. Fynd omnichannel solutions help unify the inventory of a retail brand and can effortlessly cater to orders from online and offline channels.
The omnichannel platform provides the necessary foundation, enabling retail brands to sell products from any channel even if business hours are over. That means customers get authentic branded products from the retail brand through any channel preferred by them, whether it is in-store, online store, app, social media or mobile device, putting more power in the hands of customers.
2) Excellent Catalog Management
A retail brand has to manage the listing of more than a million products every day. The product catalog is the most significant pain point for ecommerce businesses. E-commerce store owners encounter everyday issues - wrong product descriptions, poor-quality product images, and missing or incorrect product information.
It can negatively impact e-commerce businesses and erode the bottom line. A lack of product details (images & product details) can shoo customers away from your business website, only to never return. Also, it may happen that:
- Some products are available on a few channels while absent on the others
- Products are getting out of style, and lack of demand needs their removal
- Customers are searching for new models of products but could not find one
Fynd catalog management ensures that your product database is organized, structured, and up-to-date across all sales channels. By collecting and managing products effectively, businesses can improve the customer experience and make it easier for customers to find what they are looking for.
Catalog management also enables businesses powered by Fynd to keep track of inventory levels and stock outages, helping them to avoid lost sales. Finally, it can help companies improve their search engine rankings, increase website traffic, and online sales.
3) Excellent order management system (OMS)
Order management for a retail brand is crucial when you receive and manage hundreds and thousands of orders every day. Each order is verified with the seller and shipped to the customer's location as per the promised delivery date.
Sometimes, there are order fulfillment mistakes like human errors, incorrect or damaged orders, failure to deliver on time, poor inventory management, and incorrect labeling.
These can result in chatbot complaints, customer care complaints, email escalations triggering product returns, reordering, and widespread skepticism and discontent among shoppers. Such issues waste the buyer's time and the retail businesses' critical resources (handling returns, increased shipping charges, etc.).
The Fynd Order Management System (OMS) allows brands to manage orders, returns, cancellations, order confirmations, and shipping across multiple sales channels. It can help you address order management challenges and ensure that every order is handled accurately, with the products ordered by customers tracked through the entire order lifecycle. Once a new order is confirmed from any sales channel, it is packed, ready for dispatch, and delivered on time.
4) Retail brands Should cater to Endless Inventory
In the brick-and-mortar world, shoppers are limited by how much physical inventory a store has on hand. If the shopper wants something the retail store doesn’t have, they have to wait until the store gets a new shipment.
It leads to long wait times for customers, unhappy customers who cannot find the items they are looking for, and lost sales opportunities. An omnichannel retail brand can help shoppers find any missing or out-of-stock product in a brick-and-mortar store with just a few taps of buttons, even if its is not available in-store.
Retail brands use the Fynd Store endless aisle solution that connects and unifies the inventory of brand stores at numerous locations and can be easily installed on a tablet or in-store kiosk.
If the product liked by the visiting customer has run out of stock, the store representative can pop out his iPad or use the in-store kiosk to find the same size, color, and brand of the product online. The customer can happily tap the “Add to Cart” button, make the payment, and get the product shipped directly to their home.
The state-of-the-art Fynd omnichannel solutions power more than 600 retail brands and offer several benefits to retailers, including increased sales, decreased inventory costs, and improved customer satisfaction.
5) Ability to sell on B2B and B2C marketplaces
B2B and B2C selling channels are two different worlds. But what if you could use the same platform to sell on both? Yes! You can do both with an omnichannel platform. The platform makes it easy for retail businesses to list their products on multiple B2B and B2C marketplaces, synchronize inventory across channels, and optimize product data for improved visibility and search.
The omnichannel strategy increases business reachability and drives more sales while reducing the time and effort needed to manage multiple channels.
Fynd has been one of the most robust omnichannel partner solutions in the industry, which has helped Spykar grow its ecommerce business and allowed it to go live on B2C marketplaces like Tata CLiQ, Myntra, Flipkart, and Amazon, as well as on B2B marketplaces like Uniket.
Read now: How Omnichannel Transformation Powered by Fynd Led to a 200% increase in sales for Spykar
6) Gives end-to-end logistics support
Logistics support is an essential but often overlooked part of the customer experience. By providing seamless, end-to-end logistic support across all channels, omnichannel platforms ensure customers have a positive shopping experience with the retail brand.
It increases customer loyalty, drives sales, and helps build a strong reputation for retailers. Fynd bears the full responsibility of picking up the product from the store and delivering it to the customer through its logistics partner. We also support order processing, technical troubleshooting, order tracking, and dispute management.
Conclusion
Choosing the right omnichannel platform can be a tedious task, and often companies make mistakes while selecting the right solution for their business needs. If you are planning to invest in an omnichannel solution, you should consider many critical things before onboarding the platform.
In this blog, we looked at some of the essential things you should consider when choosing an omnichannel platform. As India's leading omni channel platform, Fynd knows that businesses must have the right tools to succeed in today's brutal business environment.
We hope that you have found this blog post interesting. If you have any questions about the omnichannel platform, please don't hesitate to contact us or book a demo. Our team will get in touch with you.
