If you’re running a business with multiple retail locations, then you know how challenging it is to manage your inventory and product merchandising. Shopify can help with this!
July 16th, 2024
If you’re running a business with multiple retail locations, then you know how challenging it is to manage your inventory and product merchandising. Shopify can help with this!
If you’re running a business with multiple retail locations, you may already know the challenge of managing inventory and product merchandising across each store. It’s even more of a struggle if you don't have a unified commerce solution. You'll have purchase orders and stock transfers happening all over the place without an easy way to track the shipments.
Stock transfers involve more than just shipping products, you need a plan for when the new items arrive at your store. What's your strategy for merchandising the new items? Do you know which display locations in your shop offers the best sell-through? This merchandising process can make-or-break your sales, so you shouldn’t leave it up to chance. You need hard data regarding your in-store placements to ensure you’ve optimized your selling opportunities.
Does all this sound complicated? Welcome to the modern retail business environment. You have to start thinking three-dimensionally and plan for the unique requirements at each location. Let’s look at some of the common issues merchants face and find Shopify solutions to help make running your business better.
Probably the biggest issue retail merchants face is inventory management at each store. Without a unified system, it's hard to keep track of stock levels across your different locations. You might have a surplus in one store while another is out of stock. Even smaller retailers with 2 or 3 locations find themselves with a data challenge. Your accounting team wants accurate inventory counts on a daily (if not more) basis, but how can you provide this info at a glance? Using Shopify to manage your inventory, that's how.
Using Shopify, you can assign inventory to separate locations and see a real time snapshot of your inventory. All your products and variants can support multiple stock counts for each location. Shopify will keep track of available, committed and on-hand inventory levels. You can see the complete, real time picture for any item.
This is especially helpful since most retailers tend to employ a “just-in-time” product strategy. This means you’re only ordering and receiving inventory to meet customer demand, no more, no less. To pull this off, you need to know your exact inventory levels at any given moment of the business day. When you have a unified inventory solution, ordering and transferring stock becomes much easier since you're not guessing at current quantity levels.
Shopify lets you configure multiple locations within your administration, including POS locations. Shopify Plus gives you as many as 1000 retail locations within your control. All of these locations are managed from the unified Shopify admin. You can now view and assign inventory to any of these locations. To start, you simply add the details for each of your retail and online locations. You can decide which location will hold and ship products.
By adding all your locations, you've just created a centralized repository for inventory management--that was easy. These locations are automatically applied to all your Shopify products and give you a real-time view of your stock levels. You can assign which products are available at each location and set the quantity levels. Shopify automatically updates the values after every order, stock transfer or purchase order.
This unified system will help you make informed inventory decisions. For example, if one store experiences a surge in demand for a particular item, you can transfer inventory to that store from another location where extra quantities are available. You can only do this when you have a complete picture of your products. This reduces the need for excess inventory and maximizes your profits. You get these powerful features out of the box with Shopify. If you want even more control, Shopify includes a free app called Stocky.
One great tool available to all Shopify Merchants is Stocky. This is a native app that manages your inventory needs including transfers and purchase orders. If you need to move inventory between locations, just pop into Stocky and create the transfer order.
When you create a transfer between locations, Stocky will automatically manage the inventory levels between each store. The workflow will send details to the receiving store to await arrival. With the Shopify POS, you're alerted to the transfers and can easily accept the new inventory.
If you’re a retailer, don't dismiss the importance of product merchandising. This is the process of strategically placing and displaying products within your store to encourage customer purchases. This includes arranging items on shelves, designing store layouts, and creating promotional displays. The goal is to attract attention when customers are browsing your store. It’s well known that you can influence their buying decisions by presenting products in an appealing and organized way. But how can you manage your product merchandising across multiple retail locations? Once again, we turn to Shopify's unified commerce strategy and Shopify POS.
When you’re running multiple brick-and-mortar locations, each store will have a different physical layout, unique customer base and various local trends. It’s challenging to maintain a cohesive brand experience without insight from each location. A unified commerce solution helps you gather data from each store to create a complete picture of each market. There are powerful Shopify apps like Select Merch, that help you diagram your retail locations and track sales based upon product placement.
Using the Select Merch Shopify app, you create a text-based diagram of where your products are displayed within your retail store–this is known as a Placement. The system will keep track of POS sales for each product placement. You can then see real time stats on which display is moving the most units. This will help you maximize sales and improve the customer experience. Enhancing product visibility and managing inventory more efficiently is a key aspect of good product merchandising practices. With the Shopify POS unified with your Locations, you have a complete retail solution feeding you data about sales, customers, placements and more. The Shopify POS becomes the NASA control center of your retail operations.
All these inventory and merchandising strategies aren’t very useful if you don’t have a good brain. No, not the one in your head, the one in your stores. Your point-of-sale (POS) system is the brain of your retail shop. Every sale, return, exchange and product is tied to this system. When you're running multiple locations, your POS becomes an exponential dependency. You need a synchronized unified solution like the Shopify POS.
Disconnected stores lead to discrepancies in sales data, making it difficult to get an accurate picture of your business. A unified Shopify POS system aggregates your sales data, offering a comprehensive overview of your business. It eliminates inconsistencies and ensures that you have accurate data at your fingertips. Shopify even gives you remote smart grid UI management for every connected POS device in each store--that's real power!
Once your POS locations are unified and the smart grid layout is updated, you can think about training your staff. A unified system will streamline the training process by providing consistent guidelines and procedures for all employees. Your training staff can ensure that each location has the same layout and options. Well-trained staff who are familiar with the system can then provide better service. By maintaining a high level of training and support, you can ensure that your team is always prepared to meet customer needs, fostering loyalty and satisfaction. The Shopify POS gives you this capability out of the box.
Running a business with multiple retail locations comes with lots of challenges, but unifying your commerce solutions will make all the difference. Your goal should be a centralized inventory management, merchandising and POS system. So start thinking three-dimensionally and take the steps necessary to unify your commerce solutions. Your business will run more smoothly, and your customers will thank you for it.
If you need help with any of that, you know who to call (in case it wasn't obvious, we meant Sunrise Integration. Call us...) 😉
