Insights

Apr 29, 2024, 11:22 by User Not Found

Retail businesses require a lot of moving parts. You have to keep inventory stocked, provide excellent customer service, and handle a variety of ways to pay—all while trying to reach target goals and understand the ever-changing expectations of your customers.

Having both a physical storefront and an ecommerce platform only doubles this complexity. Many retail businesses today struggle to seamlessly integrate their digital and physical storefront without compromising the experience of one or the other—yet to gain and retain loyal customers, this transition must be quick, easy, and convenient. 

Luckily, solutions exist that make retail ecommerce management easy. SmarterCommerce offers JD Edwards retail management solutions for you and your business by integration to JD Edwards as the single source of truth for inventory, pricing, customer information and so much more. Read our article to learn the five ways we make omnichannel retail management simple. 

Improve Customer Experience

Modern technology and digital commerce platforms have changed the expectations of today’s customers—they want fast service, easy digital solutions, and to feel important to the business. With fierce competition in the retail industry, if your business is not meeting their expectations, customers will find somewhere else to go. That’s why our solutions are designed to satisfy a variety of modern expectations, helping you establish loyal customers. 

There are several ways our JDE-connected solutions help improve your customers’ experiences. A few of these include: 

• Reliable Pricing Across All Sales Channels: Customers want to know exactly what they’re paying for an item. Nothing breaks trust faster than seeing one price in the storefront and another when a customer calls in for that same item. Our solution allows you to provide real-time pricing information, so your customers can feel confident that the price they see is what they can expect.

• Visibility of Past Orders, Invoices, and Customer Account History: Whether you handle B2B or B2C customers, being able to access past orders is vital for customer experience. It allows for easy reordering and reconciling budgets, whether personal or for their own business. 

• Promotions: Customers love promotions, and they help boost your business as more people are willing to buy when there’s a sale available. Our JD Edwards retail management solutions allow you to easily create and launch coupons, discounts, and promotions to help drive sales. 

• Online Stores: In the digital age, your online store is essential to the customer experience. Most customers will want their online retail experience to reflect the ease they’re used to from major retail chain stores. Our solutions allow you to provide key features to customers like shipping straight to the customer, “save for later” cart options, and “buy online, pick up in-store.” 

• Loyalty Programs: Customers want to know that you and your team appreciate their patronage, and the best way to show this is through loyalty and rewards programs. SmarterCommerce helps you encourage repeat, loyal customers through a user-friendly, comprehensive loyalty and rewards management system.

• Personalized Quotes: If you have customizable products or do B2B transactions, your customers will expect personalized quotes to meet their needs. With our retail solutions, you can add a quote request section to your site—each submission will be sent to JD Edwards, where you can review and approve. 

Keep Track of Inventory

Inventory management is perhaps the most important task for a retail business. Inventory determines what you can sell, what you need more of, and is the primary reason your customers visit your store. Up-to-date, accurate inventory information is necessary to keep customers happy and update your internal records. Inaccurate inventory can cause: 

• Unhappy customers from items being out of stock too frequently.
• Confusion about what’s actually available in your store. 
• Restocking errors (e.g. purchasing stock you had enough of or missing stock that you need to order). 

To ensure your business always has an accurate picture of your inventory, SmarterCommerce offers real-time inventory updates—including updates across multiple channels and even store locations. We’ve helped businesses with as many as 400 store locations seamlessly keep track of their inventory in each store, and we can do the same for your business. 

Our JD Edwards retail management solutions also help you to reconcile registers at the end of the day to ensure that the money you brought in matches the inventory you sold—enabling you or your employees to quickly wrap up at the end of the day and get home quicker. 

Centralize Reporting

To coincide with accurate inventory tracking, our JDE solutions provide real-time sales information to track data needed for business reports. Your team now has access to the information to then use analytic tools to track peak activity times, high-demand products, productivity, and whether your target goals were met. For your convenience, all this data is available to you in JD Edwards as the central repository for easy access for owners, managers, and anyone else who may need to see sales information.

Make Payments Seamless

Similar to how the digital age has changed customer expectations, payment options have been affected by modern expectations as well. Several new payment options have entered the market in the last few years, and more and more customers are expecting to be able to pay in a variety of ways.

Whether it’s the ability to pay online, with a card (especially by chip or tap), or with their e-wallets on their phones, retail businesses must provide these options in order to remain competitive and successful. Customers may even see a lack of these options as an annoyance or hindrance to their ability to conduct business with a retail store.

With our JD Edwards solutions, we prevent this conflict and allow you to offer easy payments with a variety of options. We also are careful to ensure the safety of each transaction through secure portals. For more information, read our blog about what payment options you should consider for your business and how we can help you implement them. 

Transition Easily from Ecommerce to In-Person Transactions

Retail customers prioritize the ease of transaction—this is true regardless of whether they are in person or shopping online. A quick and easy experience in both areas without sacrificing either is a must for any successful retail business. 

We help you provide this experience with comprehensive multi-enabled capabilities. Our solutions allow you to offer multiple language options, manage numerous websites, convert different currencies, and more. If you own more than one retail company, our platform enables you to efficiently oversee them all and apply the previously mentioned features to all of them. 

We also help you boost the digital customer experience by enabling mobile technology in-store. With our solution, your customers can enjoy interacting with PC screens or mobile tablets in stores, making your business feel high-tech and cutting-edge.

See How SmarterCommerce’s JD Edwards Retail Management Solution Can Transform Your Business

At SmarterCommerce, we offer all-in-one, comprehensive JD Edwards solutions for all your retail and ecommerce needs. Our solutions empower you and your store associates to provide exceptional customer service while managing the logistics of a retail store. All the benefits and features discussed throughout this article are available to you when you partner with SmarterCommerce. Get in touch with us today to see if our JD Edwards retail management solutions are right for you and your business!