There's more to sales than shipping packages or even solving problems. A sale is an experience where personalization is the key. Craft personalized invoices and thank-you notes for every customer who is coming through your doors, or reward your regulars with offers they can't resist using price lists. As your order count increases, you can use bar code scanners to swiftly add items to invoices or confirm draft orders in bulk.
Are you managing multiple online stores? Zoho Inventory can be integrated with multiple e-commerce platforms and shopping carts to capture your orders and consolidate them in a single window. You can also monitor payment and shipment status and auto-update your stock levels across all channels.
Whenever you transact using Zoho Inventory, you get to monitor your stock at a warehouse level. This means, you can choose the right warehouse to receive your immediate purchases or transfer your existing stock to the required location. You can also ship items to customers using more than 30 integrated shipping carriers.
Reorder levels and out-of-stock reminders keep you informed of stock depletion rates. Maximize your warehouse space by reordering fast-moving products from preferred vendors while putting your slow-moving products on back order. If you don't have the stock to fulfil an order, drop shipments offer a way to satisfy the customer and avoid losing a sale.
Is your business running on Zoho? Zoho Inventory is tightly integrated with other Zoho apps and can centralize its data for efficient collaboration. For instance, have your warehouse teams pack and ship goods using Zoho Inventory to fulfil deals converted by your sales team with Zoho CRM. Meanwhile, your accounting team can follow up on invoice payments and process refunds for the same orders with the help of Zoho Books.
Manage and track serialised and batched items through the complete lifecyle from procurement when goods are initially received, to issuing of stock, stock requisitions and sales orders, during stocktake. Track total on hand quantities for the product as well as individual items and specific costings, with Serial and Batch Tracking feature in Zoho Inventory.
While this will depend on your business model, scale and workflows, your inventory app should:
• Track your stock on hand, its value, and your profit/loss based on FIFO, LIFO or Weighted Average logic (depending on which method you use for your business).
• Provide end-to-end order management, from capturing an order, to receiving the goods from your suppliers, to packing and delivering them to customers.
• Allow you to bundle items together and make composite supplies.
• Allow you to use bar code scanners, serial numbers, batch numbers, manufacturing part numbers, and SKU numbers.
• Warn you about items that are about to go out of stock in your inventory and allow you to reorder efficiently.
• Offer multi-location stock tracking and keep track of stock transfers.
• Work hand-in-hand with your accounting software to help you stay on top of your cashflow and taxes at all times.
• Provide friendly and straightforward support to help you get unstuck.
Again, this will depend on your business. Before you look for a new solution, think about how you currently keep track of your inventory and what is lacking (in other words, your pain points). Look for the qualities listed in the previous answer before pursuing any software provider. Once you've found a few prospective solutions, give their pre-sales teams your list of pain points and requirements so that they can do a full compatibility test before you invest hours in optimizing it for your business.