Megaventory Blog - Online Inventory Management Software, Order Fulfillment and Control System

Should Backdating Documents Happen?

2020-08-25T11:49:00.002+03:00

In Megaventory, we take keeping track of every movement of the inventory very seriously. We believe that without this, an inventory and supply chain management system would lack value. However, we know that there are situations in which the original document is not valid or the dates are off. This is when backdating comes in handy, a feature that gives you flexibility while not losing track of the processes and documents.

You may be asking yourself, but what is backdating? It is just dating a document with an earlier date than its actual date of execution. This might not be allowed, or not even be legal, especially when it comes to legal documents such as contracts. However, in day-to-day business scenarios, there are many cases when backdating is necessary.

These are some common situations in which you might find it helpful:

When among all documents required when recording sales, purchases, inventories, etc. an invoice ends up not being issued without any dishonesty intended.
When for instance, a vendor supplies a product under a contract and later discovers that the customer didn’t sign it. In this case, a contract with the date of the supply is more valid than inserting the actual date of execution.
When the original document has been lost or destroyed and a replacement of the missing one is required. In this case, both parties might agree on the backdating of the document.
When you are first starting to use Megaventory, and you want to record some bills and invoices on their real date.

What Megaventory offers is a backdating feature that allows for any document that is being created to have its date set in the past (at a maximum of 180 days or 6 months). Furthermore, an already issued document can be canceled and a new one put into its place, on a date prior to the issue date of the latter. For tracking purposes, both the canceled document and the newly issued one get a document number.

To correctly use the backdating feature in Megaventory, there are some things you should consider:

If you want to make a change in your stock level, Megaventory will check what your final stock will be. If you end up with negative physical stock at any point in time, even in the past, Megaventory will not let you create the new document. So just keep in mind that you must always keep a 0 or positive quantity for a product through your timeline.

If you want to push back a purchase invoice, you need to keep in mind that it will also affect the cost of the items involved, since the current unit cost of a product changes according to the Old Quantity x Old Unit Cost and the New Quantity x New Unit Cost. This weighted average cost method will trigger a change in the cost, since the Old Quantity will be modified by backdating a document. In this case, you should check with your accountant and/or lawyer for local regulation on how to handle this.

As simple as it sounds, backdating is a very useful feature! Fix the date of the invoice you neglected to issue on time, enjoying maximum flexibility while being able to map and follow what actually happened in Megaventory!

How to backdate invoices:

After understanding what backdating is all about, it's time to put it into practice.

The backdating feature in Megaventory works the following way: instead of changing the date of a current document, said document will have to be cancelled and a new one created on its behalf, with the desired prior date.

This will allow not only to use this feature in a more conscious way, but also for tracking purposes, since both documents will have a document number.

To first cancel a document, check out how to do so here and here.

Once you are set with this, it’s as simple as creating the new document with a prior date (up to 180 days). You can check out the documents that allow backdating here.

Create your new document > Approve > Choose the warehouse > Receive, and edit the issue date as shown below. Click on create document and you will be done!

We hope you find both this feature and this article helpful!

If you still haven’t done so, create a free trial on Megaventory or book a free screen-sharing demo with us to check out backdating and many more features!

Managing a Full Purchasing, Manufacturing and Selling Workflow with Serial Numbers

2020-07-29T12:33:00.001+03:00

The serial number feature, essential for full traceability, allows Megaventory users to track the movements of individual items in their inventory right from the moment of purchase to the moment the goods are sold, and all throughout the manufacturing process. This is how you can monitor and manage serialized products in Megaventory.

Enabling serials numbers

First and foremost, start off by Enabling Serial Number Tracking by clicking on Account Setup under Settings. You can enable them when shipping (ie when selling and receiving Finished Goods) or when shipping and receiving (ie also when consuming Raw Materials and shipping goods as well).

As shown below, you can also choose if you want the serial number to be unique per product or for it to be unique across all products.

Once this is set, and before heading to the manufacturing process, you might face two different situations: you might want to add serial numbers to products you already have in stock, or you can just add serial numbers to incoming goods. In any case, you need to assign serial numbers to the stock before it can be used in a manufacturing process that tracks serial numbers.

Adding serial numbers to products you already have in stock

Under this scenario, in which you have activated serial numbers in your Megaventory account after having already entered some products, you will have two choices:

Add serial numbers to individual products

The first one is to head to Products > View Products - Services. Once there, find the product that is associated with the serial number you want to add and click on it, and check the box that says “This SKU requires a Serial Number”. You can also define the desired length of the serial number, although this is optional.

Once you click update, search again for the product you’d like to assign a serial number to, and click on the barcode icon next to the SKU.

To add the new serial numbers that will be associated with this product, just enter them in the box (separated by commas) and then select the Inventory Location in which the products will be located.

Remember that the number of serial numbers being assigned to an Inventory Location cannot exceed the available stock.

Add serial numbers in bulk via inventory taking

The other option is to perform an Inventory taking. This will allow you to define the serial numbers for the products you already have in stock on your account, and add serial numbers to the stock you actually have in the physical count.

Head to Inventory > New Adjustment and download the spreadsheet for inventory taking once you choose the Inventory Location in which you’ll carry it. This spreadsheet includes an additional column for serial numbers (assuming that the serial numbers module is activated in the account).

You will need to fill in this column with the serial numbers (separated by commas) for each product, and upload the file as csv.

The advantage of doing an Inventory Taking is basically that it allows you to record serial numbers for products you have on physical count but don’t show up on Megaventory. Click here if you want to learn more.

You can also use both of these methods if what you want to do is to delete or edit a serial number.

For deleting a serial number with the first method, select the option to delete serial numbers as shown in the screenshot below. To edit it, just delete the incorrect serial numbers and then use the same box to enter the correct one.

Adding serial numbers to incoming purchased goods

This option consists of adding new serial numbers for products without stock in your inventory location.

In this case, when the items of your Purchase Order arrive and you click on Receive, you will be required to enter the serial numbers. This can be done by typing the serial number or by entering them via a barcode scanner.

Keep in mind that the number of goods in will have to match the number of serial numbers you have introduced.

After entering the serial numbers, you can view them in the tab called View Serial Numbers found under Products and Services.

Manufacturing with serialized products

Now that your Raw Materials and goods in Megaventory will have serial numbers assigned to them, the next step in order to start manufacturing would be to create a Bill of Materials.

However, before creating a Bill of Materials for a certain product, you will have to create the product code you will produce. Click on Product and Services > New Product - Service.

Since you are creating a new product code which will be meant to be manufactured, remember to set the product type as “Manufacture From Production Order” or “Buy From Supplier/Manufacture From Production Order”.

Further down, check the requirement for serial numbers.

You can now head to Production > New Bill of Materials and choose the product (Finished Good or subassembly) you want to produce, and create its Bill of Materials that may include serialized products together with their quantity. In this case, to produce FG_SERIALIZED, the only serialized product would be Product_14.

Once the Bill of Materials is ready, go to Production > New Order, type in the product code you want to produce, the inventory location in which you’ll produce and the quantity. You can also add other detailed information such as an Order Reference (a description for the order being created) and use custom documents for this Production run (so that you can have different headers shown).

By clicking on Create Order and then Allocate, you’ll reach a table similar to this, where you’ll have to allocate materials. You can either input the Finished Good quantity you want to produce for automatic calculation of material quantity, or manually input individual material quantity to allocate.

Remember that since we are working with serial numbers, you will also have to provide the serial numbers of the serialized goods you are using.

When your production process is over and you click on Receive Finished Goods, you’ll also have to assign a serial number to the Finished Goods. After this, you can go ahead and close the production order.

If instead of manufacturing a product with a single level of production, you would like to produce a good with more than one levels of production (a top level product that has subassemblies to be made first from the Raw Materials), head to this article where we explain both types of manufacturing processes step by step.

Selling serialized goods

You will now be able to carry out a sale either with the serialized Finished Goods that you have produced, or with those you have in stock.

Go to Sales > Orders > New Order and fill in the client data and the serialized product you want to sell. You’ll also need to pick the inventory location you will be shipping from.

When you click on Ship, you will need to define which serial number you are shipping out, and by clicking on the serial number tab you can keep track of the serial numbers of the goods you shipped:

When you are done, you can close the sales order, which will make all fields strictly not editable.

Conclusion

You now know how to:

Assign serial numbers to your stock
Purchase goods with their own specific serial numbers
Produce using some of the Raw Materials with specific serial numbers
Manufacture a Finished Good and assign it its specific serial number
Sell an item with its specific serial number

Use this to have full traceability of what goes in and out of your supply chain! You’ll be able to track what went into a finished good, tell apart individual finished goods and even prevent and detect mistakes since serial numbers cannot be used twice!

Are you ready to try out this feature and many more?
Manage your production with serial numbers with Megaventory now!
Sign up now for a free trial

How To Personalize The Language And Terms In Megaventory

2020-07-07T12:31:00.012+03:00

In Megaventory, we understand that switching to new software or changing the inventory management system might be challenging at times. This is why we don’t want the language to become a barrier.

Megaventory can be used in English, Spanish, Greek, French, German, Arabic, Portuguese, and Romanian. And not only that. To make its use even more seamless, it also offers the chance for different users to use the software in different languages, and even to localize/translate terms in order to customize the interface.

This can be very useful when first starting to use Megaventory, as it allows you to use your language of choice, create your own text strings, and maintain the company’s terminology. It is also great when:

Using Megaventory in an international company, with users in different countries
Having international teams with different mother tongues
The client/partner is also granted access to Megaventory and uses different terminology

The possibilities and uses are countless, and you just have to follow these simple steps:

ORDER AND INVENTORY MANAGEMENT SOFTWARE IN YOUR NATIVE LANGUAGE

Are your company’s operations based in Germany and all your employees most comfortable when using German? Or are all your products and terminology also in German? Megaventory allows you to set the entire account in the language of your choice!

You just have to choose one of our available language packs, following this simple path:

Head to the menu and click on Settings. Then, click on Account Setup and choose one of the language packs we offer. You will be able to see the changes just by clicking refresh!

Another way to do this is by clicking on Settings > Localize > Update Account Language, and to pick the language of your choice.

Are you ready to manage your inventory in your own language?
Manage your sales, purchases and production with Megaventory now!
Sign up now for a free trial

ORDER AND INVENTORY MANAGEMENT SOFTWARE IN DIFFERENT LANGUAGES PER USER

In addition to choosing a language pack for the whole account, each individual user can also localize the software to the language they are most comfortable with.

Are you an international company that is working with foreign employees? Imagine that you are a French company that uses the software in the French language and you hire a Spanish employee. Megaventory gives you an opportunity to set the desired language per user! Follow the instructions to see how easy it is!

This can be done by the admin, or the user itself. It is as easy as following these steps:

When choosing the language from the admin account, head to the menu, and click on Settings. Then go to View Users & Permissions and click on the user name of whom you want to change the language.

Enter your password to continue and select the language of your choice for the user in question.

You will also reach this menu when changing the language from any user account, by clicking on My Profile in the top right corner and entering the password to continue. Pick a language from the Use Language Pack field, hit update and you will be good to go!

ORDER AND INVENTORY MANAGEMENT SOFTWARE WITH CUSTOMIZABLE TEXTS

Once you are comfortable with the language of the interface, you might also want to change some text strings according to the business terminology used in your company. For example, the term “Supplier” might be changed to “Vendor”, “Inventory Locations” to “Warehouses” etc.

Megaventory also has many fields created in advance which are optional (e.g. Custom Order Flag 1, Custom Order Date 1, etc), that can be customized and defined this way to fit the specific needs of each business.

Click on Settings > Localize > Update Specific Phrases and Select the Language you want to personalize from the drop-down list. You will then see a display table.

To customize any field, follow the steps below:

Enter the name/text of the field you want to customize/localize in the Start Typing To Filter area under the Language column (second column, “English” in this case) and hit Enter to filter by this text.
See all the instances where the name/text in question is included in the results which appear below.
Update the necessary text in the text form field under User Defined Language Text. Copy and Paste the default test, make the necessary changes and hit Tab - the change is saved instantly. In order to see the changes, click Reload on the top left corner. (Remember that your custom name/text must comply with the maximum character requirement for that name/text, and that the user-defined language text cannot contain any of the following invalid characters: <, >, ", # or only white spaces.)
Repeat for all the instances of the name/text in question to ensure consistency.

If you were to localize specific phrases from another language that is not English, say Spanish, you would have to filter Step 1 under the Idioma Actual (Current Language) column, as seen below.

We hope this article was helpful and will make your use of Megaventory more pleasant!

Are you ready to manage your inventory in your own language?
Manage your sales, purchases and production with Megaventory now!
Sign up now for a free trial

Dealing With Inventory: A Few Costs To Keep In Mind

2020-06-19T12:01:00.004+03:00

Running and managing the finances of a business is a tricky ordeal that requires you to monitor, track, and organize a company’s transactions, expenditures, and purchases. Among all the different performance measures, monitoring the way a company is performing in regard to sales, inventory levels, advertising or marketing, and profitability are a few of the important metrics that companies need to keep an eye on.

This is especially important for those companies that are handling physical goods and inventory levels, and managing concepts like lead time, COGS or shipping expenditures, since these have become a whole new element to their financial and operational management, and make up a set of costs that companies need to be aware of.

Transforming the Raw Material or Goods

The process of turning the raw materials or goods into a finished product, more often than not, requires time, energy, resources, and personnel to help along the way. These elements, minding the fact that the cost of these finished products has to factor in all these different costs incurred during the transformation, affect the financial statements such as balance sheet, income statement, or statement of cash flow.

The factoring and allocation of all these costs itself, on the other hand, also plays a role in the financial success of the company. One last thing to keep a close eye on is the speed at which costs rise, and the speed at which products are selling, which will allow to keep the company in check financially and maintain the type of growth they are experiencing.

Managing Inventory Levels

Fulfilling the orders which have been made requires the necessary inventory on hand, so the number of orders or demand for a product play an important role when it comes to managing the level of inventory.

While it is difficult to forecast the exact number of orders a company might have, over the course of running the business and its operations, the company can have a sense of the level of inventory they need to have on a daily, weekly and monthly basis. And not only that, but they also need to be aware of the storage costs and opportunity cost related to keeping said inventory level, in order to find the optimum.

Another thing to keep in mind when it comes to managing inventory levels is the lead time or the time involved to obtain or produce new inventory. The lead times associated with a product or with a company are often one of the barriers it faces to fulfilling orders and ramping up production, since sometimes there is only so much a plant, a factory, or a system can produce, and it takes time for a new order, a new batch, or a new shipment to be processed. This lead time has an indirect but important effect in costs, and especially in liquidity, since it extends the period of time from when the order is placed to when the payment is received.

Shipping or Freight Costs

The shipment of a good or the transportation of it comes with a financial component or a financial cost as well. There are different factors that partake into this role: the weight and dimensions of the product, the speed at which the good needs to be transported or shipped, or even whether the buyer or the seller is paying for the shipping.

Fixed Costs

The machinery, equipment, and real estate a business needs are capital outlays that can sometimes be major and very significant in regard to the business, its operations, and its allocation of costs. Whether it is by buying or leasing, each company needs to be aware of the fixed costs it needs to incur in order to continue its operations.

Employees and Payroll

On the flip side of human capital, is the payroll component. And with employees, there’s also the cost of hiring people, the onboarding process, and even the cost associated with firing people or having employees leave. All these costs have to be taken into consideration to maintain the financial wealth of the company.

Managing the finances behind a business that deals with physical products is an interesting and complex dynamic. Whether you’re looking at the prices of current inventory, the types of sales, orders, or demand that’s in the near future, or the expenses the business or company incurs during its operations, they all factor into the financial aspect of the business.

Howie Bick is the founder of The Analyst Handbook. The Analyst Handbook is a collection of 16 guides created to help current and aspiring Analysts advance their careers. Prior to founding The Analyst Handbook, Howie was a financial analyst.

Megaventory in the top 15 Gartner Category Leaders

2020-03-03T13:12:00.000+02:00

This year we're once more happy and proud to have Megaventory included by Gartner's GetApp among the top 15 Inventory Management Category Leaders!

This is a result based on user reviews placed 100% by our customers in the Gartner sites such as getapp.com, capterra.com, and softwareadvice.com

We've found these tools to be invaluable to our customers that are in the process of shortlisting solutions for their company because they host authentic reviews from users who have been using our inventory management software specifically in their business (and not just people who create an account just to place a review as other sites do).

Furthermore, the filtering available allows prospective customers to see the reviews of existing users in the same situation (industry and company size) as them and make an informed decision about considering Megaventory.

At the same time, it's easy to get a quick overview of the application with the star rating and pros and cons section and know what to evaluate further by means of a trial account. Finally, their feature-by feature-comparison of an application with its direct competitors allows prospective users to get started on the right path to procure the best inventory management option available.

Are you ready to optimize how you manage your inventory?
Manage your sales and purchases with Megaventory now
Sign up now for a free trial

The Category Leaders badge is a trademark and service mark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates and is used herein with permission. All rights reserved. GetApp Category Leaders constitute the subjective opinions of individual end-user reviews, ratings, and data applied against a documented methodology; they neither represent the views of, nor constitute an endorsement by, GetApp or its affiliates.

5 Cyber Security Threats You Might Not Be Aware Of

2020-02-17T17:50:00.000+02:00

This is a guest post by Lynne Jeffery, the Head of Public Safety Solutions at NEC New Zealand. Lynne has over 20 years’ experience in the global technology sector with a specific expertise in biometrics and cyber security solutions.

Cyber security continues to be a hot topic in 2020. Despite advancements in Cyber Security solutions, 2019 has already seen 4 billion records breached, according to Norton. These vary from mega-breaches that grab the headlines and tend to hit large global organisations to the hundreds, possibly thousands of less familiar data hacks that often go unreported in the media.

Over the past months, organisations such as Capital One, Georgia Tech and even the UK Police have been hit with data breaches. Norton reported that there was a 54% increase in the reported number of breaches in the first half of 2019 compared to the same period in 2018 – a sign that cyber security remains a very real threat for businesses large and small.

Whilst cyber security threats like phishing attacks and Internet of Things (IoT)-related threats are widely reported and combated, it’s often the less well-known cyber security threats that cause the most damage for businesses.

5 lesser-known cyber security threats

There are many reasons why organisations leave themselves open to cyber security threats. Having a robust cyber security policy and investing in cyber security software can help to mitigate against the majority of threats, however it’s sometimes the lesser-known cyber security threats that can fall under the radar of both policies and software solutions.

Here are five of the lesser-known cyber security threats that have caused problems for organisations large and small.

1. Supply chain

Whilst your own cyber security measures and policy may be extremely robust, other organisations within the supply chain might not have the same level of security and this can lead to issues for you and your business.

With the increase of information sharing and the ways and means we have of sharing data, so too the opportunities for exploitation increase. The best way to mitigate against cyber security threats within the supply chain is to work closely with suppliers or partners in the chain to ensure your cyber security policies and security measures are aligned.

Software is one way of mitigating against cyber security threats, however education plays just as important a role and the opportunity to pull suppliers and partners together can also help to reduce the cost to all businesses in the supply chain when it comes to cyber security education.

2. Backing up to the cloud

The cloud presents many opportunities for businesses and employees to work remotely and to ensure information is backed up. With the increase in flexibility and functionality, however, comes a variety of threats to cyber security that need to be controlled and managed.

One of the big issues comes when people back up corporate information (such as contacts) to their personal iCloud/Google account. If employees use personal devices to access their work files through the cloud, it becomes more difficult to manage the apps that they are downloading and the permissions they are granting to those apps. Quite innocently, employees can grant third party apps access to your secure data via the cloud and a breach becomes possible.

It’s important for organisations to control any applications that have access to their network through a strict vetting process. Education is also a key part of ensuring that in this day and age of BYOD, employees are aware of the threats of third-party apps and the vetting process you have in place.

3. Untrusted browser extensions

Browser extensions can be brilliant. They can help us to go about our day to day jobs more efficiently and provide us insights directly in our browser that we may previously have had to work a lot harder to find.

A process that often gets overlooked in cyber security policies is the vetting of these browser extensions. These should be vetted like any other piece of software. At the end of the day, they potentially have the opportunity to see and track everything you are doing online presenting a serious threat to cyber security.

Whether you are vetting them personally or your IT department keeps a closer eye on them for you, all extensions should be vetted like an app or piece of software. Check for the permissions they ask for, check the background of the developers and any other apps/extensions they have developed and look at the reviews left by other users. Keep browser extensions to a minimum – the ones that are essential to your day to day work.

4. Weak passwords

This might not fall in the lesser-known bracket, however for a lot of people, it falls into the ‘never changed it or haven’t changed it for a long time’ bracket.

In an age where businesses large and small are relying more on more on cloud-based services that require password access, one of the big problems face by organisations is employees selecting passwords that are too weak and easily guessed. Another issue is using the same password for multiple accounts.

There are a number of software solutions out there to help businesses manage more tightly controlled password security including third party sites such as One Password or LastPass. Google also provides its own password management service through the Chrome browser which will help to auto-generate highly secured passwords and store them for you.

Multi-factor authentication is perhaps the most secure way to go. This means that employees will need more than just a password to gain access to business accounts. Steps can include verification texts sent to a mobile device or using authentication applications.

5. Dodgy USB sticks

The innocent USB stick can be a cause of major cyber security issues if they are not managed correctly. Some of this is done with malicious intent – viruses are pre-loaded to USBs before the even hit the stores and unwittingly, people transfer a virus to their computer thinking they are using a brand new, clean USB.

As with most of the items on this list, education is important. Ensuring all your employees know where the USBs have come from that they are plugging in to their computers is the first step in preventing a cyber security incident.

Company-wide, it’s important to keep operating systems up-to-date and make sure you have effective anti-virus software installed. If you are unsure about a USB device, run a virus scan on it before you open any files.

Summary

Moving more and more into 2020, cyber security is more important than ever. With the number of breaches increasing in 2019 compared to the previous year, cyber criminals are finding more sophisticated ways of breaching cyber security measures. That’s why it’s crucial to ensure your cyber security policy is robust and that you have a comprehensive educational program in place to ensure your employees are aware of all the latest threats as well as some of the lesser-known cyber security threats mentioned above.

Image credits: Daniel Frese from Pexels, energepic.com from Pexels, Kaboompics .com from Pexels

Getting Started with Magento as your Online Sales Channel

2020-01-29T18:01:00.000+02:00

Having gone through the key advantages of adopting Magento as your solution of choice when it comes to e-commerce, we now consider the benefits it brings in more detail and look into how to get started with it. For that, we have invited Syed Muneeb Ul Hasan, the Magento Community Manager at Cloudways, the popular Managed Magento Hosting Platform to provide insights.

Magento is a leading Content Management System (CMS) that offers all the standard elements and functions that are essential for a successful web store. It is the premier go-to CMS for web store owners that have thousands of products to offer, deal with a large volume of traffic and provide a comprehensive set of features and designs.

More than 250,000 merchants around the world are currently using Magento to power their e-commerce stores. Henceforth, Magento is a go-to choice for many online businesses.

Magento doesn’t only support big organizations like Nike, Liverpool Football Club, Coca Cola, Ford, FoxConnect, Warby Parker, Olympus, etc. but it’s also the backbone of many Small and Midsize Businesses (SMBs) and growing startups.

In this post, you will see why an online business should choose Magento for selling its products online, and what factors to consider while building an e-commerce store with Magento.

Benefits of Magento as a Sales Channel

I’m not sugar-coating things about Magento. It’s true, I am a die-hard fan of Magento for e-commerce. It comes down to premium features, user-friendly navigation, a commendable structure that makes the store performance outstanding.

Many reasons tend to entice big companies and other online merchants to choose Magento e-commerce to sustain their online businesses. Here are some of the essential reasons that developers and store owners tend to prefer Magento over other e-commerce platforms.

Reliability

Magento was already a popular CMS out there, but it got a business boost after acquisition by Adobe in 2018. It further enhanced the brand’s reputation and image in the community.

Magento is considered as a reliable e-commerce platform because it’s an open-source that offers robust features and flexibility. Following are some of the important points that make Magento a reliable platform for e-commerce businesses.

Magento allows you to manage multiple websites from a single admin panel for a particular version.
Developers are free to customize themes as per various requirements.
As a store owner, you can leverage with a Magento CMS for the landing page.
Moreover, Magento is 100% SEO friendly, offers one-page checkout, various shipping options, secure payment gateways and much more.

Highly Scalable & Flexible

Magento CMS is capable enough to handle more than 80,000 transactions per hour and manage up to half a million products on one site. It’s one of the advantages of using Magento for your online business.

It means that you can expand your store at any time as your business expands, especially during the peak sales season.

Security

Security is an important factor for any online business. The developers at Magento are keen to protect every single e-commerce website from vulnerabilities and brute force attacks. Moreover, they try their level best to ensure ironclad security by realizing new updates and security patches regularly.

High-Performance

Magento brings peace in your life and wiped out all your slow page loading, slow searching, and other speed-related woes. Magento uses modern technology that includes Varnish, Memcached, FPC, Redis, and other optimized database options. All together brings the top-notch e-commerce performance with high user engagement while utilizing minimal server resources.

Better Mobile Experience

Most of the online buyers prefer smartphones over laptops or personal computers. According to the statistics, 79% of smartphone users had made a purchase online using their smartphones during the last six months of the year 2019.

It’s necessary to consider a responsive store design for your Magento online store that is compatible with any kind of device. Moreover, it offers a better shopping experience and meets the demands of your users, Magento offers HTML5, allows adjusting the image size and support product videos.

Ease of Integration

Third-party extensions and themes play a vital role in the development of a Magento-powered online store. Magento is an e-commerce platform that easily integrates a large number of third-party services including payment gateways, shipping, order tracking features, etc.

Progressive Web Application (PWA)

Magento recently built its own Progressive Web Application (PWA) studio that introduces the new-era of frontend web development. The Magento PWA Studio helps developers build an e-commerce platform that offers high speed, capable to run in offline mode, and is readily responsive to all types of screens, etc.

Custom Development

Developers love the word ”Open Source”. Magento facilitates developers allowing them to make changes in the source code and have full control over custom development. Being a developer, you can customize the online store as per the requirements of the merchants.

Magento Pricing

Magento has two major variants, one is Magento Community Edition that’s for a developer that doesn’t charge any cost. You just have to download and start developing your e-commerce store right away. The other one is Magento Enterprise Edition that comes with a lot more additional and premium features. Magento Commerce pricing starts from $22,000 and high as $190,000 per year.

Additional Magento-related costs will also come into play. Check out a typical list of estimates in the following pricing table for Magento.

Magento-related Work Prices
Development with an Agency	From $25/hr
Development with a Freelancer	From $10/hr
Development with own In-house Team	From $60,000/yr
Pricing of Magento Themes	$0 – $200
Pricing of Magento Extensions	$50 – $500
Graphics/Animation/Videos	$10,000 – $18,000
Domain Registration	$10 – $500
Hosting	From $10/month
Maintenance	$80 – $125/hr

Magento Editions, Installation and Hosting

The Magento Community Edition is the premier choice for many companies that are serious about e-commerce but are only getting started at it. It’s free of cost and it is capable enough to deal with a large number of products as well. It is compatible with Magento 1.x – 2.3.x. Meanwhile, The Magento Enterprise Edition comes with a price tag, which unlocks more exciting features and technical support.

If you are willing to use Magento, you must understand that different Magento versions have a different set of requirements that you need to fulfill. For instance, if you want to use Magento 2.3 for your online store development, you must ensure that the following technical requirements are fulfilled to get an optimized and flawless store performance:

· MySQL 5.6, 5.7

· MariaDB 10.0, 10.1, 10.2

· Percona 5.7

· MySQL NDB Cluster 7.4.*

· PHP versions: 7.1.3, 7.2.0

· Apache 2.2 or 2.4

· Varnish version 4.x or 5.2

· Redis version 3.2, 4.0, 5.0

· RabbitMQ version 3.7.x

The installation of the above requirements typically isn’t a piece of cake. It takes a lot of effort, time and energy in this time-consuming installation process.

However, if you don’t want to get into the technicalities, then a managed Magento hosting solution is one reliable approach that meets all the requirements that Magento supports, and it will enable you to install Magento easily.

Here’s a quick way to launch your Magento server with Cloudways and get all the server requirements to streamline your store’s processes.

Final Words

As this post comes to an end, I assume that you are motivated and ready to start the e-commerce aspect of your business with Magento. I hope after reading this, building an e-commerce store with Magento shouldn’t be stressing you and you might have a road map to start your store.

In my opinion, Magento is among the best options to get started with your e-commerce effort and scale it to the new horizons of success. Above all, Magento has a great community and customer support team which is always ready to assist developers and online merchants.

If you have any point of view or any feedback around this post, don’t forget to use the comment section below.

Megaventory note: Once your Magento version is available in Cloudways you can install the Megaventory extension to start managing your Magento stock too across multiple locations, user permissions and other such configurations.

Considering ecommerce sales? Look into Magento!

2019-10-01T15:05:00.002+03:00

Although ecommerce and online purchases have been booming, many businesses hesitate to adopt online sales. Typically companies think that e-commerce brings challegnes like cost, complexity, constant necessary optimizations, and difficulties in coming by support.

Even if there’s a truth in these concerns, it is not as challenging as it used to be in the past. Today, there are solutions like Magento which although fully-featured – or someone could even call them ‘heavy’ – which make the entire venture much more accessible.

Ecommerce hosting and setup

One of the key concerns about e-commerce is setting an eshop up. In the case of Magento, it is really easy to get started now. You don’t even need to have dedicated hardware anymore. For example, website hosting companies like cloudwaysoffer very cost-effective packages with one-click installs of Magento. That way, at a first level you don’t need to worry about your e-shop’s reliability anymore. Support both for the hosting server and for the Magento installation itself can be covered for you at a reasonable price.

Initial eshop improvements

Once the site is up the challenges continue of course. It is expected that the new online presence will attract little traffic at first. That can be addressed, if the business has a physical presence like a store, if it runs promotions to existing customers either online or offline or if it has been around for a bit offline and has brand awareness.

In any case, at the beginning, whatever little traffic comes in must be exploited to the fullest and with a minimum budget (as this new sales channel will not have revenue initially). One smart idea for this is to use Magento extensions to address cart abandonment – these basically attempt using appropriately timed messages with the right content to lure back customers to their cart to compelte purchases. For instance, Optimonkis such a useful tool that can help with cart abandonment, cross-selling and upselling to increase cart value, etc. And, for early days when traffic is low, it's free – so it’s a win-win arrangment for all involved.

Online sales management

As soon as e-commerce sales pick up, it is also important to keep track of orders generated on this channel so you can have online availability at the same time as products are sold in physical stores (or even in other online channels). Megaventory offers a Magento integration which helps online shops running Magento to handle their stock availability better.

So, for example when an online sale takes place, our Magento extension enables the staff in the warehouse to automatically (and without potential errors in data entry) to get all the necessary information to ship it. Furthermore, when offline sales take place site visitors will see reduced availability and that way it is ensured that the same product isn’t sold twice!

Advanced ecommerce features

Once early challenges have been addressed, more advanced problems can be sorted too. Optimization is constantly necessary to generate more sales, achieve better performance and enjoy higher security. The Magento marketplace is full of extensions which can supercharge an ecommerce effort. For example, the onestepcheckoutextension of Magento, which is extremely modular, allows merchants to shape the checkout and create a superior theme design of their preference with minimum resources and development skills. That way they can enjoy improved conversion rates and better sales figures.

Conclusion

Magento enables you to sort things out with the technical implementation of putting together an ecommerce channel. Certainly, it is not at ease of use levels of 'point and click' but it is much more approachable even by non-technical people too – even with only a bit of help by a part-time developer for example.

Also, services such as Zapier can allow for connectivity of Magento with other apps without any development work. Yes, for a wide array for other things, a specialized Magento development company or a similar professional on retainer may be needed. In any case, putting together, maintaining and expanding an online sales presence is not out of reach with Magento these days.

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How to find the best order management software

2019-07-22T16:26:00.000+03:00

Regardless of your exact business type, if you are handling orders from suppliers and to clients, it is most likely that the competition is constantly growing. As such, it is important to be as efficient as possible while you try to grow your business. The appropriate business software is is one of the solutions you need to be looking for, if you don’t already have a satisfactory solution. It is the best way to optimize your processes and grow your profits.

The benefits of order tracking software

The implementation of such an order management system is crucial. You will be able to manage every order with more simplicity. The structure in the steps you will be taking during these procedures will help you to reduce your errors and have a better knowledge of your order details.In fact, you are not only going to reduce your possible faults but also the cost and the time you spend for every order. You will not need to worry about unnecessary paperwork again. Storing the information of every order will help you create a valuable database and have more qualitative customer support.

Start by creating a list of requirements

However, each business has a different structure and handles its procedures in a different way. Before you make the final decision of the most suitable order management software, try to consider some important factors. Take into account the size of your business, the range of your products and the features that are needed for a typical order, for example. It is helpful to create such a list with all your requirements. In addition to this, if your list is extensive, it makes sense to split the features you need into ‘must-have’ and ‘nice-to-have’ ones.

Look into business software directories

An effective way to find the best solution is to visit sites that their main feature is the promotion of software and its comparison. A well known site for this purpose is getapp.com. In this site you can have a look on every feature of all the software applications that you are interested in and compare these features side by side. For example, you can check how Megaventory's features compare with other solutions using getapp. With such a tool you can compare all order management software solutions that seem relevant according to your list of requirements and find the ones that are the best fit to your company.

Go over user reviews

The best way though to really understand the quality of a software solution software is to go through the opinions of those people that have interacted with it in person. Sites such as fitsmallbusiness.com reviews extensively software with people who have spent time with the app - you can see an example of the Megaventory fitsmallbusiness.com review here. Similarly, sites like capterra.com contain lists of products along side the review opinions of various customers of these products. Again, as an example, you can check the Megaventory reviews to get an idea about the useful insights available from our actual customers.

Trial the software yourself

It is very helpful if the software you are evaluating provides a free trial and gives you the ability to have a close look on every aspect of the system. Following this method you can check out the features of the software in detail.

In Megaventory in particular we have put a lot of effort to make this step as helpful as possible. As such, you can use in-app step by step guides which can take you through all the important information, be notified by pop-ups at relevant times and benefit from a live chat with an expert who can answer your questions. of course. If you have any questions you should also be able address them through the software's knowledge base. For instance, Megaventory's knowledge base contains more than 250 articles to help its customers to find answers.

Receive a demo by the vendor

In cases where your business model has many components, your shortlisted features are many and not so straightforward or if simply you need a bit of a personal touch to understand how things work, you can always book a demo with the company providing the software. So, feel free to schedule a demo when you believe you've found the software that offers the right solution.

During such a session, typically provided over screen-sharing, you can get answers to questions you haven’t been able to clarify in previous steps. You can also get a feel of the type of support and how knowledgeable the vendor is. Hopefully, by the end of one (or perhaps two) demo sessions, you will have confirmed that the application is a good fit for your company. To illustrate, you can book a Megaventory demo by using this link.

An order management software is not only a useful tool, but a crucial part of your business. Choosing the right system to organize your orders is the key for the success of your company. Make sure to take stock of all your needs and you can start to find the right software that fulfills all your requirements using the above steps.

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How to Value Inventory When Selling A Business

2019-07-11T14:33:00.000+03:00

This is a guest post by contributor Marla DiCarlo outlining how inventory and its value should be approached in any company which handles stock and its business depends on keeping detailed information about the inventory costs.

Inventory has the potential to become quite the contentious issue when selling a business. If the seller and buyer do not agree on the inventory count or value, it will prove difficult to reach an agreement on the business' sale price. Though it will be challenging to accurately value the entirety of your company's inventory, it can be done. Let's take a quick look at how to value inventory when selling a business.

Tabulate the Inventory Cost

The first step to accurately gauge the value of your inventory is to determine the price of your inventory based on what you paid for those items or spent to manufacture them. If you paid varying costs for different items in your inventory, you need to know all this information in detail. It does not matter if the items were bought in bulk, purchased individually or made at varying cost at your manufacturing facility; you must determine the true cost of the entirety of the inventory based on what it cost to acquire or make those items. The individual or entity bidding on your business deserves to know exactly what it costs to acquire your inventory down to the penny.

Calculate the Inventory Sale Price at Current Rates

Break out the calculator and add up the true cost of your inventory based on the sale of each item at its current price. As an example, a company that sells widgets for $25 a piece would have an inventory value of $2,500 if it had 100 units stocked in inventory. The sale price of your inventory will prove critically important to those interested in placing a bid. Such a sale price can be determined at today's rates or - if that's impractical to find out - in the rates you typically sell at.

Account for Goods That Cannot be Sold

The value of unusable goods, damaged goods and goods that cannot be sold for another reason must be subtracted from your inventory's retail value. As an example, consider a frozen fish supplier that has a power outage along with a generator failure that causes 100 servings of fish to spoil. If the retail value of each fish serving is $20, a total of $2,000 must be subtracted from the inventory' value. However, the cost of inventory remains unchanged. Unusable goods affect the inventory's retail value as opposed to what it cost to acquire or make the inventory. This is also information which needs to be maintained at any time and be easily retrievable

Perform Ongoing Adjustments of Inventory Values

Inventory value is dynamic rather than static. The true value of your inventory hinges on current market rates. This means business sale negotiations that take place weeks or months prior to the current date will be based on the inventory's price at the point of those initial talks. Continue to adjust your inventory value as time progresses to ensure they reflect the items' true value at the current moment in time. Otherwise, there will likely be a disagreement as to what the actual inventory value really is when negotiations advance. Furthermore, inventory value must be adjusted as new items are added and old items are sold.

Strive for a Mutually Beneficial Inventory Value

The inventory value must prove acceptable to the business buyer as well as the seller. In some cases, it makes sense to sell inventory separately from the company. The bottom line is there is no 100% foolproof means of tabulating the true value of inventory as there are multiple methods to calculate value. Discuss inventory valuation with the party interested in acquiring your business, reach an agreement on a mutually beneficial inventory value and both sides will feel as though they are getting a fair shake.

Marla DiCarlo is an accomplished business consultant with more than 28 years of professional accounting experience. As co-owner and CEO of Raincatcher, she helps business owners learn how to sell a businessso they can get paid the maximum value for their company.

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Choosing suppliers based on product lead times and availability

2019-06-25T15:11:00.000+03:00

If you run your own retail or wholesale company, you need to ensure a supply chain that works as efficiently as possible. Selecting the right vendor(s) to work with is an essential procedure. While you manage your sales and orders, a wrong choice of supplier may end up being devastating. As such, to arrange your orders it is essential to know with who you will cooperate with. Shortlist all the possible vendors that can provide the products you want and figure out who is better for your needs.

As a first step, you should choose partners which are on the same page as you and are compliant with their commitments. Make sure your choices of partners are straightforward and clear. You are not looking only for extra help, but also for someone who is an expert you can rely on. It is important for your cooperation to know what they can provide to you and what are their requirements. So speak with many vendors and go into agreement with only the ones that check the most boxes which matter to you!

List the particulars of each agreement with your suppliers

Once you have created a list of your vendors, then attach all the agreement features that they offer. You can have a look and give priority to the ones you consider more valuable for the products you need. A helpful piece of advice is to gather all the accurate information from every vendor in a single point. You can use this later as a reference when choosing where to order from (without having to dig up contracts, agreements, etc)

Know the product details, the stock levels and the lead times of your suppliers

You should also be able to know for each product the information you need and which is relevant to the supplier. For example, in Megaventory we have a table such as the following.

That way you can know at any time the exact price at which the supplier offers the product to you and its product code and description (often supplier details are different than how your business presents them to its clients). It is crucial also to know about the stock level of each supplier and the lead (delivery) times of every product.

Ensure you can handle variable quantities and lead time ranges

Problems are often presented during communication with the vendor. One of the most significant is when there is a misunderstanding about the lead time of the product - ie how long it will take for an order to get to you. Be sure that you have agreed for the precise date you expect to receive a product so you are able to organize fulfilling your orders precisely and on time. It is key you have time ranges which are pre-defined and not too wide. Using Megaventory, you can define and see the individual delivery times and the quantities of every supplier, as shown below.

You are able at any point prior to making your order to have a look at every vendor on your list. It is useful to check the period of time they deliver and the quantity ranges of their products. That way you can make the optimal purchase prioritizing either against price, delivery time or other vendor preferences.

Organize your orders

After you have determined from which vendor a specific purchase order will be served, and consequently know the expected date and the quantity ranges of every product, it is time to fill in your purchase order. At this point, the supplier from whom you will receive the product and the quantity being ordered should be all you need.

In case of managing multiple locations, it is also important at this point to wisely pick the inventory location where you will be able to receive the products ordered.

After you set up such a purchase order with one of your vendors you should be able to know when each item in the order arrives. You should also be aware of the earliest and latest delivery times of the order, taking into account all the individual products in the order and their respective lead times. Megaventory will easily do the calculation for you but you can also override Expected Dates to enter your own values.

This process will happen more than a few times and from various vendors before you can consider the stock as having been replenished adequately. In fact, in most industries, this is an ongoing process. As such, it is helpful to gather all your orders on one or more single list. It can be a great advantage to know any time you want every detail of all the purchases you have made. Here’s how Megaventory users complete and organize all their orders.

A stock procurement system for your company and your suppliers

The key before you start the selection process of the right vendor is to choose the right system to integrate into your company. In this case, you are looking for a system such as Megaventory to help you organize all your products and collect all the information about the selected suppliers. You can see anytime the stock of your supplier, the purchase price they offer for every product and the expected date you will receive your product.

The implementation of a system like this can help you prioritize and select efficiently the supplier with the best price and lead time. It can provide you all these features you are looking for, it can help you avoid mistakes and move fast and eventually it can help you grow your business much faster.

Do you import stock wholesale in order to sell to retailers? Do you purchase goods to deliver to your customers? Do you rely heavily on your suppliers continuous good performance?

Are you ready to take your supplier inventory management to the next level?
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Inventory Organization: Update Your Layout, Save Pick Time

2018-12-11T15:00:00.000+02:00

When it comes to inventory, you need every process to move like a well-oiled machine. As one of the last and most important steps in the retail pipeline, you never want picking to be the step that slows you down. But your machine won’t work if the parts don’t fit together well. This is where effective inventory organization comes into play. A great layout that makes the most sense for your space can assist everyone in pulling inventory quickly and easily, making the whole process run a little bit more smoothly.

Inventory organization is rarely easy, though. Space and time limitations, the constant in and out flow of of product, and the sheer overwhelming feeling that comes with tackling such a big task can cause re-organizing your inventory space to fall by the wayside way too often and for far too long.

Fortunately, there are a few steps you can take to get started, and get your inventory space organized in a way that maximizes your space and optimizes your resources.

Stock Optimization Starts With Space Assessment

What's happening? Where is it happening? And is that the best possible place for it to be happening? There are a few of the questions you need to be asking when deciding on the most efficient layout for your picking space.

Of course, keeping things at ground level, whenever possible, will help make picking easier and faster. But without ample room and well-planned paths to navigate, even the simplest setup will slow down and eventually create bottlenecks and jams.

Organize your inventory so there is a well-defined flow for employees to take on their picking journey. Simple steps like grouping items that are commonly shipped together, and routing traffic to avoid doubling back or constantly retracing their steps can make a big difference, especially when space is limited.

Visualize Product Movements to Improve them

Your current setup may seem like it is working. But your current layout is likely masking a huge problem. Wasted motion and needless traffic in the wrong places.

Wasted motion in warehouses costs billions in productivity every year. In food warehouses alone, wasted motion consumes 6.9 weeks annually, at a cost of $4.3 billion annually.

In order to help you conduct the space assessment and optimize your warehousing, try literally mapping out the current flow. A paper and pen are all you need to start. Or use the time-lapse camera function on your phone to watch a whole day’s traffic Which routes are being taken most often? Do they make sense? Do they involve lots of long trips or out-of-the-way detours to pick the right products?

Also keep an eye—and make note of—where things are going wrong. Is there a particularly overstuffed corner where people get caught up? Is there a reshelve tub that’s constantly parked in the wrong place? Are there areas where too many people are picking at once because of the popularity of the item?

Knowing of these issues with certainty—witnessing them and taking note—can help your get to the root of your traffic problems and visualize how to begin fixing them.

Storage Cleaning and Upkeep Are Mission-Critical

From a safety standpoint, from an efficiency standpoint, and ultimately from a financial standpoint, cleaning and upkeep are an absolutely critical part of inventory organization. Just like you plan ahead to ensure you never run out of an item, you should also be planning ahead to ensure your inventory space stays well organized and tidy.

Having a plan and arranging your space once is not enough. Once everything is in place for optimal picking time and function, you have to make sure things stay that way. Everything needs to have a designated area. Empty pallets, boxes, and other trash should be removed as soon as they are created. Any spills or other messes should be addressed immediately.

Clean-up and reset at every position and every shift or day have to become second nature. Perhaps use project management tools to ensure this clean-up process happens each day. A place for everything and everything in its place. Enforce a no-mess policy for a couple of weeks and you’ll be amazed at how big an impact it has on overall energy and flow.

Constantly Do Warehouse Audits

Is there any bigger headache than trying to work around inventory you just don’t need? It takes up space, it requires time and energy to try and figure out what to do with, and it ultimately means more work to finally get rid of it.

Well, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, and the best thing to do with unneeded inventory is to avoid having it in the first place. By regularly evaluating low-turn, out-of-season, EOL inventory, you can create more accurate forecasts for what you need, and prevent the buildup in the future. And for any excess you already have lying around? Have sales/marketing develop strategies to sell through, return, or liquidate.

Product Location Is The Most Important Thing

It really is everything. According to Supply Chain 24/7, “travel time can easily account for 50% or more of order picking hours” so it is imperative that travel time is reduced and picking strategies are in place so time is never wasted. So much of this depends on location. From the location of the item within your space, to the space itself, location plays a vital role in determining the efficiency of your picking. Make sure your understand your location, its drawbacks, and its strengths, and plan accordingly.

And while all these tips might help make you make a better plan for achieving inventory organization, the biggest predictor of efficient picking is this: treat inventory process initiatives as mission critical for the company. Sure, there are lots of steps that come before and after, but in the long run, good business depends on good picking.

This is a guest post by Laura Hudgens, a writer for TechnologyAdvice.com. She is a communications instructor and freelance writer who studies and writes about technology, media, science, and health.

Making Inventory Management More Efficient Using Weighing Scales

2018-10-22T17:59:00.000+03:00

It is crucial for every single business which deals with inventory to keep track of it. However, keeping track of each and every piece of inventory can be extremely challenging, especially if the inventory consists of small parts. In fact, counting such parts by hand is rather impractical. So what do you do? You implement a reliable weighing scale system such as industrial floor scales that enable you to count many pieces of the same part quickly by using the weight of each piece.

Here are 5 tips on choosing the right weighing scales to make inventory more efficient:

Consider the Scale’s Scope and Application

In case you are not sure how to choose floor scales for inventory, then consider your inventory process and the volume of the stock that needs to be counted. If you have small pieces of inventory, then a large scale wouldn’t be ideal as bench scales would be more efficient for the job. Not only can a bench scale do parts and check counting but it can also be connected to a remote platform to increase its capacity. You also need to consider the size of your inventory as well as the scale to ensure your stock fits into the weighing pan. Implement scales that can accurately measure even the smallest variation in the weight. Lastly, ensure that the scale is fully adapted to your products.

Program the Scales

Several scales have features which allow you to program them. For example, you can:

• Set a sample size by using a numeric keypad, allowing the counting scales to count the items based on that or by checking the weight of an initial sample. These ways will ensure the accuracy of the scales.

• Make sure you measure and storethe weight of your pallets initially. This will help in weighing palletized goods as it will remove theweight of the pallet, thus the final displayed weight would be that of just the goods.

By programming the scales, you can be sure that they are optimized for the necessary weighing tasks, thus saving time and energy. Moreover, some scales can be connected to multiple scales and platforms in order to be more efficient.

Calibrate the Scale Before Each Process

The accuracy of all measuring devices, including weighing scales, will degrade over time. It can be caused due to normal wear and tear, hazardous manufacturing environment, electric or mechanical shock, etc. All these cause errors in readings, which can be eliminated by regular calibration. You must calibrate your scales before starting the inventory taking process. If the scale is being used to manage the inventory throughout the year, then you need to ensure that it is calibrated frequently as it will eliminate the errors and produce accurate results.

Choose a Scale Based on Your Goals

Weighing scales can be applied in various industries to measure different types of inventory. For example, industrial weighing scales are ideal for big warehouses and heavy products, bench scales and floor scales can be used for versatile inventory and smaller counting scales are great for small parts. Choose the right weighing scale based on your requirements.

Integration and Remote Access

The scales can be easily integrated using a standard network to connect to an existing network (Ethernet). This connection allows remote access to inventory levels in addition to increasing the efficiency and convenience of the working process. This makes walking back and forth to constantly check the inventory unnecessary. Integration also helps in ensuring that you never run out of supply with its feature of remote monitoring of stock. This feature also enables optimization of the entire supply chain and trend analysis from the comfort of your computer.

Weighing scales not only help you improve inventory management process but they also increase the overall productivity and profitability. Therefore, it is a good idea to implement them in your processes, if they are applicable.

This is a guest post by contributor Kevin Hill.

Kevin Hill heads the marketing efforts at Quality Scales Unlimited in Byron, CA. Besides his day job, he loves to write about the different types of scales and their importance in various industries. He also writes about how to care for and get optimized performance from different scales in different situations. He enjoys spending time with family and going on camping trips.

How to Address Manufacturing Challenges: A Modern Approach

2018-09-05T12:16:00.001+03:00

Modern manufacturing companies have a lot on their plates. While you’ll often hear for example how manufacturing is on the decline in the United States, that’s actually not the case in many different industries. Despite the recent upturn in some areas, there are more challenges than ever faced by modern manufacturing companies. These struggles are empowering engineers and forward-thinkers to establish new solutions that will carry manufacturing into the 21st century.

While what follows is in no way a complete list here are the most common challenges facing modern manufacturing companies today.

Image via Unsplash

Manufacturing Labor Management

Labor jobs have long been dominated by the Baby Boomer generation that grew up thinking manufacturing jobs were the best option right out of high school. As this generation continues to age, many developed countries have seen a decline in skilled labor for these manufacturing positions. Over the next decade, there is expected to be an increased number of openings in these positions, but there are no longer enough laborers to meet this demand.

In the next few years, there will need to be both improvements in automation and an increase in skilled training opportunities for new members of the job market. This means manufacturers need to get smart about hiring. Many jobs can be replaced with automation, software, and outsourcing. This not only means lowered expenses for companies but also more efficient production.

Handling Production Global Pressures

One of the most well-known problems facing modern manufacturing companies are the global pressures to compete with big powerhouses like China that are taking over the manufacturing industry. However, manufacturing in developed countries is making a comeback as more Western manufacturing companies are targeting new audiences. Manufacturing companies will need to adapt to meet the global pressures of this new marketplace. Ultimately, there is a need to stay ahead of this competitive game. Manufacturers can gain an edge by staying informed about and acting upon the latest developments both at home and abroad.

Assembly Technology Advances

Technology is changing every day. We see people being replaced by machines on the production line, and this leads to greater speeds, precision, and advancements in product development. The common practices such as injection molding and CNC machining (learn more about this) are still present in the manufacturing industry but 3D printing, for instance, is taking this industry by storm.

Because the technology is changing so quickly, it’s difficult for manufacturers to keep up with changes. The companies that are able to adapt quickly are the ones that will see the most success in the digital age. Changes that we are seeing most companies make today include moving to cloud technology and modular software. These are small steps, but ones that have a big pay off.

Manufacturing-related Data Protection

With the rise of technology comes new challenges in data security. Cyber attacks are on the rise recently and nobody is immune, especially manufacturing companies. Because manufacturing companies of today rely so much on technology, they’re highly susceptible to attacks from cybercriminals. The only way to protect themselves is to invest in top security provisions that prevent software from accessing important data and processes necessary to run a business.

Another data change is the introduction of GDPR compliance. This is no longer optional, and companies need to consider compliance with new laws with every new move. Security and privacy issues are a problem for all businesses today, but manufacturing companies have to be especially careful!

New Marketing Strategies

All businesses are facing a new world of marketing. Things of the past like mail ads, publication ads, and cold calling are no longer effective. Manufacturers need to target businesses in new ways. B2B marketing is all about digital strategy nowadays. By positioning themselves as experts in their fields and the best choice to solve a customer's problem is the only way to succeed in the digital marketplace. SEO, social media, and content marketing are all ways for businesses today to reach new audiences with their marketing.

Image via Unsplash

Environmental Concerns from Production

Finally, there are changing regulations that affect the way manufacturing companies conduct their production. Because manufacturing and environmental concerns often go hand-in-hand, companies need to address these new environmental regulations to ensure they’re following the law. This usually has to do with how employees are exposed to materials, how manufacturing waste is handled, and the byproducts of their production. These regulations can vary by region, so the proper understanding of specific laws is necessary.

Companies looking to reduce their environmental impact should make an effort to go paperless as a good first step. This is an easy change, and it’s also more efficient to minimize paper communication across company departments. These small changes have a big impact, and they show real progress.

Manufacturing changes are affecting all sectors of business. As the world of manufacturing continues to change, companies will need to adapt to new movements, trends, and technology. Luckily, these challenges aren’t impossible to overcome! As long as modern manufacturing companies are proactive, their future looks bright.

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About The Author

Ashley Lipman is an award-winning writer who discovered her passion in providing creative solutions for building brands online. Since her first high school award in Creative Writing, she continues to deliver awesome content through various niches.

"Out of Stock": 3 Inventory Management Horror Stories You Need To Learn From

2018-02-14T16:30:00.000+02:00

About The Author

Bruce Harpham offers content marketing for B2B SaaS companies. His work has been published in CIO, Infoworld, ProjectManagement.com and IT World Canada. He is the author of “Project Managers At Work.”

Inventory management failure is no theoretical problem. In fact, it’s still with us in 2018. Let me share an example:

Earlier this year, I was shopping for spinach at one of the larger supermarkets in my neighborhood in Toronto. The only options were salad greens… But like Popeye, I prefer spinach!

I ended up tracking down a store employee who explained the day’s produce shipment had been delayed 9 hours. He went to the storeroom and handed me a fresh box. The store managed to recover from their inventory problem.

Here’s the problem:

Ecommerce customers have other options one click away (Amazon Prime!). That means you have less room to maneuver and recover if run out of inventory.

Run out of stock once and your loyal customers may forgive you and come back later. Do it too many times and you’ll have to rebuild that customer base. If your reputation for inventory problems spreads, your business may be doomed.

Inventory management failures, like all tragedies, has many causes. Learn the early warning signs from these horror stories and you’ll be able to keep your customers coming back for more.

My Wedding Décor: how inventory problems shifted their strategy

Remember Chris Anderson’s best selling book “The Long Tail”? I remember picking it up at an airport and reading it with excitement. Endless choices! This will be great!

The reality of endless inventory has two problems. First, there’s a real cost for businesses that have to manage that quantity of physical inventory. Second, psychological research has found that most people are overwhelmed by too many choices and do not buy.

My Wedding Décor, an Australian company that provides wedding clothes and products, experienced rapid inventory growth. Elizabeth Hollingsworth, the company’s founder, put it this way in Practical Ecommerce: “When the website launched in April 2015, it began with 80 products, which had grown to almost 500 products at the end of 2016.”

If coping with a rapidly growing inventory of products wasn’t enough, here’s what happened next:

“One supplier whose original rental threshold was $200 increased it overnight to $500. This forced me to delete many of their lower-priced products that would have required a ridiculous number of units hired to reach their threshold.”

Whether or not you’re in the wedding industry, you can draw inventory management lessons from My Wedding Décor. You never know when a supplier will change the rules on you. You can reduce the impact of such a change on your business though. How?

Use a robust inventory management software solution like Megaventory and do your own analysis regularly. That proactive approach will make it easier to keep your business growing when supplier problems hit you.

Inventory management is the only way to win in India’s grocery ecommerce market

In the dotcom era, several companies attempted to make grocery ecommerce work. Yes, Webvan failed to achieve success as a grocery e-tailer despite railing $800 million.

Despite those early struggles, there is demand for the service. The category has found a following - as of 2017, 7% of Americans order their groceries according to AdAge. How are the winners in grocery ecommerce making it work?

It all comes down to customer expectations and fine tuned inventory management.
Amazon has the bar high for ecommerce. Customers expect their orders to be delivered fast and in great condition. With grocery ecommerce, your inventory cannot sit on shelves for weeks or months even with great refrigeration. A recent surge of investment in grocery ecommerce produced few winners.

Is there a path to win in grocery ecommerce? Yes! That solution lies in mastering inventory management:

“The startups that shut shop followed the on-demand hyperlocal mode, which is a ridiculous business model. That’s why they failed. BigBasket survived because it had its own inventory, distribution centre and directly distributed orders to the customer. That is the business model that can be sustained,” says Arvind Singhal of Technopak.

Hundreds of online grocery startups shut shop since 2015, why are unicorns now betting big?

Investing in inventory management is one reason why BigBasket is winning in the market. Companies in this category are known to spend heavily on customer acquisition. That leaves no margin for error in keeping inventory moving.

For our last example, let’s go outside of the ecommerce field.

What if you had a successful national brand and you wanted to expand? Opening stores in another country shouldn’t be that hard, right? Let’s dive into the Target Canada story next.

Target Canada’s Epic Inventory Failure

In the ecommerce field, it’s easy to dream about expansion. You just add capacity with your outsourced providers and call it a day, right?

In reality, it’s not always that easy. In fact, even companies with a strong brand struggle avoid inventory management failures. Target, a retailer with nearly 2,000 locations in the USA, recently failed in its expansion to Canada. The failure cost millions of dollars and badly hurt the company’s reputation. The failure is all the more notable because many other large American retailers - Whole Foods, Wal-Mart, Home Depot to name just a few – have been successful in Canada for years.

Fundamentally, inventory and supply chain failures lie at the heart of Target Canada’s failure. Let’s dig in and find out what these inventory management problems looked like at the ground level.

According to Canadian Business:

[Target's] concern was that with severe supply chain problems and stores facing the prospect of patchy or empty shelves, Target would blow its first date with Canadian consumers

It didn’t take long for Target to figure out the underlying cause of the breakdown: The data contained within the company’s supply chain software, which governs the movement of inventory, was riddled with flaws. At the very start, an untold number of mistakes were made, and the company spent months trying to recover from them. In order to stock products, the company had to enter information about each item into SAP. There could be dozens of fields for a single product. For a single product, such as a blender, there might be fields for the manufacturer, the model, the UPC, the dimensions, the weight, how many can fit into a case for shipping and so on. Typically, this information is retrieved from vendors before Target employees put it into SAP. The system requires correct data to function properly and ensure products move as anticipated.

A team assigned to investigate the problem discovered an astounding number of errors. Product dimensions would be in inches, not centimetres or entered in the wrong order: width by height by length, instead of, say, length by width by height. Sometimes the wrong currency was used. Item descriptions were vague. Important information was missing. There were myriad typos. “You name it, it was wrong,” says a former employee. “It was a disaster.”

What’s the lesson from Target Canada’s inventory management horror story? Even if you have all the inventory you need in stock, bad inventory data can kill your business. Bad inventory data means your staff (or outsourced providers) have to work much harder to ship products. The likelihood of disappointing customers is high.

What’s next for your inventory management process?

If you’re growing and want to keep your customers coming back, it is a critical function to get right.

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We love conversation so if you'd like to share your own inventory horror stories, write a comment below or tweet us!

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Megaventory integrates with 1,000 apps!

2018-01-29T16:00:00.000+02:00

Getting your work done as a modern business requires the combined use of many apps.

You may have a CRM app to manage communications with your clients, an e-mail marketing tool to automate your mailing lists, an inventory management system to streamline your supply chain operations and order fulfillment, and an accounting platform to track your payments and keep your books updated.

While all these apps can reduce workload greatly, wouldn’t be awesome if in some way they could also talk to each other, automatically?

Now this is absolutely possible!

Streamline your Operations with Megaventory Zaps

Megaventory now connects to 1,000 other web tools, thanks to our Zapier integration.

With workflow automation tool Zapier, you can set up your own integrations called “Zaps”. Zaps will automatically send information from one tool to another, so you’ll spend less time manually transferring data between business tools and can dedicate more focus to creative, big picture tasks.

The following are only some of the available zaps:

3 More Integrations to Try Out

Since 1,000 apps is a quite overwhelming number, we’d love to mention three apps that work complementary with Megaventory and you can try out today.

Process Street

Process Street is a business process management tool that makes it easy for businesses to create and collaborate over recurring checklists like client onboarding, sales qualification, and supplier evaluation. It helps teams improve consistency because every member knows exactly what they’re supposed to be doing next, and task progress is visible to managers.

But how to use the integration with Process Street?

Integrations save you time from mundane tasks like data entry, one of the biggest time wasters. One tedious data entry task is updating your inventory management software with the data of a new supplier. If you have already filled this data while evaluating suppliers you can save time from doing this again in Megaventory, by having Zapier do the filling in for you.

In the same logic, with Zapier you can trigger a reversed zap. For example, if you have in place an onboarding process for every new customer, you can set it up to create a new checklist each time a new client is created in Megaventory.

SurveyMonkey

Even though a customer bought from you once, this doesn’t necessarily mean that they will do so again! Often, customers are dissatisfied with the purchase or delivery process, and their previous experience with your business prevents them from going forward with a second purchase. Many times angry customers become vocal about their feeling, but it is quite often that a customer will decide to remain silent on this and just don’t ever do business with you again. As a business owner, you may see your churn numbers growing up and have absolutely no clue why.

The answer? Just ask them with a survey!

SurveyMonkey is one of the most popular survey platforms, allowing you to easily build, send and monitor your surveys. Although it is commonly used for research, did you know that you can also use it to gain valuable information on your customers?

For example, you can set up a zap to send a survey about their recent purchase, each time a new client is created in Megaventory.

Intercom

Intercom is a popular CRM solution and one we use ourselves and love. You can use it to set up a live chat on your website (customers with unanswered questions often means abandoned carts!) or/and streamline your e-mail marketing efforts.

How to use Intercom integration?

Data entry is a tedious task so the more you can eliminate, the better! With this integration, you can set a zap to automatically update a company or user in Intercom, when a client in Megaventory is updated and vice versa. That way you are always sure that your customers’ data are always up to date, and your messages reach the maximum number of people.

A last note

With so many available integrations the possibilities for automation are endless. To help you out on this, Process Street has created a thorough guide on business process automation through Zapier. This guide will walk you through several examples of business process automation being used right now by startups and enterprises, and help you start saving time and money today.

So, why don’t visit Zapier’s page and experiment with the available triggers and actions?

If it is too overwhelming (the options are THAT many now!) just send us a message at support@megaventory.com and we will respond with the best combination of triggers/actions to achieve your desired result.

Why Customers Leave: Megaventory’s Study on Churn

2018-01-04T16:30:00.000+02:00

The main ambition for most – if not all companies – is to reach more people and grow their client base. In the mind of many, it’s simple mathematics.

More customers means more revenue. Seems reasonable, right?

Well, not exactly.

According to various studies, it is actually more profitable and cost-effective to retain and satisfy existing customers, rather than constantly trying to attract new ones. Nevertheless, many companies tend to relax when they see their rate of new acquisitions growing up and neglect to pamper their older customers.

If you are guilty of this mistake and your company is in the SaaS industry, this mini e-book is for you!

Why Customers Leave?

In recent literature, there is a variety of reasons why paying customers might cut their ties with your business. The most common ones can be summarized in the following list:

Bad customer service
Poor on-boarding experience
Missing feature
Usability issues
Bugs or other technical issues
Unexpected Inconveniencies
No Loyalty Programs
Customer-related issues

When a customer stops using a subscription service that they are subscribed to, it is generally referred to as “churning” or “churn”.

A similar term is churn rate, which refers to the proportion of subscribers who leave a supplier during a given time period. In other words, churn rate is the number of the customers you lost over the number of customers you initially started with.

But why calculating churn is important?

Churn is a possible indicator of overall customer dissatisfaction, cheaper and/or better alternatives, more successful marketing by competitions, or reasons having to do with the customer lifecycle.
As resources and time are limited, knowing the reasons of churn, i.e. where you fall behind, you can allocate your team members and funds where it will matter the most.

Megaventory’s Case Study

But what new does this case study add?

Most studies about churn tend to focus on how to predict and identify the customers who are about to churn and what (mainly marketing) actions can prevent the churn.

Our approach is slightly different: we asked ourselves first “why do people stop using a product?” Starting from there we created a series of metrics to investigate the possible reasons that lead our former customers to stop using Megaventory and to understand which of them are actually statistically important.

In other words, we wanted to find out what seems to have the biggest impact on churn.

It can be summarized in the following metrics:

Time to cancellation
Pricing plan and number of users
Use of features: cards and reports
Last subscription package
Missing feature
Reported bug or technical issue
Demographic factors

Addressing these 7 key metrics we hope to be able to:

predict possible churners better and be able to take proactive measures to retain valuable customers, and
understand what needs improvement on the product (features, usability, on-boarding, payments options, etc)

As many SaaS companies have a similar business model, checking our Megaventory’s case study might be beneficial for the SaaS entrepreneur, founder, or developer that wants to reduce the number of canceled subscriptions. Note that only one of the possible reasons is Megaventory-specific (Cards and Reports – no 3) – the rest are easily applicable to other SaaS companies too.

Even if the metrics don’t directly correspond to your business model and other industry details, it may still be educational to see how we did our statistical analysis and be inspired for your own analyses.

Click the button below to start reading Megaventory's Case Study:

We love conversation so if you have any feedback or business stories you'd like to share with us, write a comment below or tweet us!

And if you liked this e-book, don't forget to share it with your colleagues and friends!

9 Marketing Ideas To Make Your Store Stand Out This Holiday Season

2017-12-19T17:00:00.000+02:00

This is a guest post by guest contributor Krista Fabregas from Fit Small Business

The holidays is a season of giving, and it’s also a season of spending! If there was any time of the year where consumers are in a frenzy to spend, it’s now. According to forecasts, holiday retail sales in 2017 are expected to reach $680 billion, so it’s not surprising that the season is a blur with marketing campaigns designed to get customers’ attention.

Getting your business to stand out from all the holiday promos isn’t easy. The biggest question among marketers is how to outdo last year’s campaign and stand out from all the other stores.

In this article, we have 9 holiday marketing ideas to give your store that much-needed advantage this holiday season.

1. Create Holiday Themed Videos

Holiday-themed videos are always a hit with customers when the season starts. You can post them on your website, social media pages, and in customer emails. The important thing to remember is to create a fun and lighthearted tone. This is not the time for hard selling; rather, your goal is to become memorable to your audience.

Here are some video marketing ideas you can use for the holidays:

Gift ideas videos. People are always looking for that perfect gift for a loved one, so if you’re a retailer, a video showing great gift ideas from your store is bound to get a lot of views. Choose the right holiday background music, and make sure to have a strong CTA at the end to encourage a purchase.
Videos referencing holiday events. If you can, tie your products or services to office holiday parties, family gatherings, or other holiday events. That will keep your business top of mind throughout the season.
“Year in review” videos. People love to reminisce about the past year during the holidays. If you can reference popular events from the year and tie in your products and services, that’s a great way to get people thinking about your business heading into the New Year.
Informative holiday videos. For instance, if your business is a school and office supplies store, your videos can be about creative gift wrapping ideas. Here is a holiday-themed video from Pottery Barn on how to decorate your front door for the holidays:

2. Leverage Your Yelp Presence

The holiday season is a special time for family, friends, and co-workers, which is why everyone tries to find the best places to hold events, purchase gifts, and create memories with loved ones. Yelp’s factsheet as of September 2017, indicated retail shops as the most reviewed business category at 22% of its total reviews. Many people go to Yelp to find stores that offer what they are looking for and check customer reviews. As a business owner, you should take advantage of your Yelp profile to help stand out during the holidays.

Make sure that you have “claimed” and authenticated your business, and have responded to reviews that you have received. You should also make sure your holiday hours are accurate. People who search Yelp spend more time on listings with photos. So, update your profile for the holidays with holiday-themed photos that feature your store such as your store displays, a Christmas event you’ve held, and even photos that your customers have shared on your social media feeds.

There are also Yelp Deals, where you can offer your visitors incentives for visiting your profile. These are consumer discounts in the form of prepaid vouchers that visitors can purchase on your Yelp listing and use at your store.

Announce holiday-themed events on your Yelp profile to stand out to customers.
Source: Yelp

3. Spread the Holiday Cheer on Social Media

When not shopping around for gifts this holiday season, customers are on their social media accounts going through updates and looking for entertaining posts to read. As a business owner, your job is to create entertaining posts that will stand out to your target customers.

You can start with creating festive images on your social media, sharing photos of your seasonal products, or even run a holiday giveaway. Whatever it is that you choose, the objective is not to hard sell, but to be memorable, informative, and engaging so customers will remember your brand when they go out and begin their holiday shopping. You also want people to share your postings with their connections so you can reach a wider market base and have a better chance of getting more people into your store.

Here’s an example of how a few years ago Krispy Kreme Doughnuts got customers into the holiday spirit:

Krispy Kreme promoted their Christmas themed products on social media
Source: www.newspapergrl.com

4. Launch a Seasonal Adwords Campaign

Digital campaigns affect both online and offline sales, so it’s a good idea to concentrate on getting an effective and timely Google Adwords campaign for the holidays. Google Adwords lets you bid on keywords (pay per click) you would like to use to advertise your business and whoever wins the bidding gets a space at the top of the search engine results page.

You can target holiday keywords such as “holiday gift ideas for teens” or “Christmas gifts for new moms.” The broader the phrase, the more expensive it is usually is to bind on, so try to narrow down the keywords as much as possible.

The average cost per click for 2016 was $2.14, but prices can increase by 140 % each year during the holidays. It’s important that you maximize your opportunity considering the costs involved so make sure that your landing page is as festive and generous as the season. Go all out on Christmas specials and countdown incentives to increase conversion rates because your competitors will be doing the same.

5. Create Exclusive Gift Items

One of Starbucks’ best marketing ideas (in some locations) is their limited edition annual planner. Even with smartphones that can do almost anything to manage your day, the Starbucks planner is still considered a special gift. It’s well made and can only be redeemed by collecting promotional stickers from each coffee purchase, creating a sense of exclusivity.

The Starbucks planners can be redeemed exclusively after completing a sticker card that requires a purchase of their handcrafted coffee products.
Source: www.thepeachkitchen.com

You can do something similar for your own store. Have your marketing team come up with a special item, a plan, and a budget. For example, you can find a supplier that will allow you to order a customized pen that doubles as a stylus, or an elegant looking wallet engraved with your logo.

This kind of holiday season marketing idea will have to be planned ahead of time, and you may have to spend a considerable amount of money for the initial design, launch, and advertising. But if done right, this is a marketing idea you can repeat every year that your customers will look forward to. It will not only increase your sales, but it will also improve brand awareness and reputation.

6. Start a Charitable Campaign

There’s no better time to campaign for a worthy cause than the Christmas holidays. Being the season of giving, consumers are in the mood to give to charitable causes. Partner with a charitable organization, and pledge a donation in kind for every donation a customer makes. Ideally, this should be relevant to your product or brand to make it memorable to your customers.

For example, if you have an office supply store, offer your customers a chance to donate a set of notebooks and pens to schools in need. If your store sells clothing and linens, ask customers if they would be interested in donating winter clothes or a blanket to the homeless.

Every holiday season, Macy’s and the Make-A-Wish Foundation help kids send letters to Santa and contribute to children in need.

Have the items already prepared and wrapped in eco-friendly gift wrapping and let your customers write their name on the cards. Before the charitable campaign comes to a close, take photos when you turn over your gifts to the charitable foundation and make sure to put them on your website.

7. Host a Store Event

Physical store events are always fun, but they’re so much better when done during the Christmas holidays when everyone is in a festive mood. There is always the meet and greet with Santa event, but why limit your event to that? If you run a bookstore, you can hold a Christmas story telling event for children. If your business is involved in electrical supplies, invite your target customers to a demo on Christmas lighting hacks. Grocery stores can hold a gingerbread house-making contest where families can join.

Here’s a plant store’s Christmas event announcement:

This plant nursery announced a family Christmas event with activities and discounts available for their customers.
Source: www.hartwellnurseries.co.uk

Make sure that you advertise these events online through your website and social media platforms. You can offer special discount vouchers valid for the day of the event. If possible, have a blogger or a local journalist cover your event to get maximum visibility for your store.

8. Send Holiday Email Promotions

Last year, 20% of holiday sales were a result of email marketing, and that is expected to rise this year. In order for your emails to stand out, make sure your subject lines eye-catching. Add Christmas themed emojis and imply a sense of urgency on them (e.g. Christmas discount valid for 24 hours only!). As for the content, make your holiday marketing emails worth your target market’s time by adding value to your offers.

Some examples of holiday-themed marketing emails are:

Announcing extended holiday shopping hours with special discounts beyond the normal operating hours
Invite your customers to participate in a “naughty or nice” reward after minimum purchase.
Send an “end-of-year” update email to your customers with special discounts for your most loyal patrons.
Holiday gift catalog or list of gift ideas
For online shops, send discount coupons or free shipping vouchers for their next purchase.

9. Make Your Marketing & Promotions Mobile Friendly

The latest statistics on retail e-commerce shows 2016 holiday sales from online stores amounted to nearly $400 billion, and that is expected to increase in 2017. Aside from making sure that your website is responsive, there are other mobile-friendly marketing campaigns you can adapt for the holidays. For example, you can offer your customers “mobile-app-only” offers and discounts. Ask customers to provide both email and mobile phone number for special discounts when they are shopping in-store and check out with a purchase.

Here are additional tips for making your promotions work well on mobile:

Make sure that your marketing messages are short and sweet. Too much text on a mobile message can end up losing your target customer’s interest.
Don’t require mobile users to provide out too much information in order to sign up for a promotion or create an account on your website.
When marketing on your social media account, make sure to use large call-to-actions and font to make them easier to see on a mobile device. Use memes and other eye-catching images to stand out and attract attention.

Remember that you have only a tiny window of opportunity before a mobile user scrolls down to other posts.

Over To You

The holiday season is an excellent opportunity for marketers and small businesses to aggressively campaign and increase their sales. The only limit to your options is your creativity and how prepared you are to make your store stand out in a sea of holiday marketing strategies.

Author's Profile:

Krista Fabregas is a staff writer and ecommerce analyst for Fit Small Business, specializing in ecommerce. Krista spent 16 years building two specialty ecommerce sites up to more than $1.5 M in gross annual sales.

3 Ingredients to Fight Cart Abandonment in E-commerce

2017-11-09T16:00:00.000+02:00

This is a guest post by guest contributor Robin Singh

Few things are more frustrating for ecommerce businesses than customers failing to check out their shopping carts. Even if your website is effective enough to convince a customer to fill their online shopping bag, there is never a guarantee that they will follow through with their purchase.

According to Baymard.com, a reputed e-commerce analytics website, the average abandonment rate for online shopping carts is approximately 68%. This number is too high to ignore and further proves the importance of slowing down cart abandonment rates for the success of your e-commerce business.

The shopping bag abandonment rate of your website can be calculated by dividing the total number of finalized transactions by the total number of initiated transactions. This is an important statistic for e-tailers to consider because high abandonment rate could hint that your website has substandard or even poor user experience.

Here are 3 main ingredients that eliminate cart abandonment for your e-commerce business:

1. Issue free or flat-rate shipping

High shipping rates on your items can repel even the most interested customers that need your products. Put yourself in a scenario where you're an online shopper. You finally spot the item you want and put it in your shopping bag. After filling out the address details, you're surprised to find out a shipping rate that makes up half of the price of the product itself! That’s a good reason enough to abandon the item completely and look for alternatives on a different site.

Online shoppers are usually price-sensitive, so it is integral for you to provide free or a small flat shipping rate for all items.

Free shipping rates will encourage customers to come back to your site to make more purchases. This results in more sales revenue generated as well as increased website recognition as satisfied customers are likely to recommend your site to their friends and colleagues.

Research from UPS revealed that over half of the top 10 reasons for cart abandonment deals with shipping. There are various ways to combat this.

Zappos is an e-commerce website that provides free shipping for all their items.

Display the shipping cost early. Never lead your customers and then hit them with your shipping costs. This catches them off-guard and results in them leaving your site in dissapointment.
Display shipping rates based on location. Online customers usually search for the cost of shipping specifically to their location before committing to a purchase. Incorporate a shipping cost calculator close to the price displayed on the item.
Flat rate shipping. A standard and fixed shipping rate lets your customers know the price they can expect when it comes time to check out.

2. Re-target customers

Customers have lives and can face various distractions that hinder completions of their online purchases. Customers may also be time-conscious and may not have time to fill out all details in the checkout process, so they place an item in their cart to be checkout out on another day.

It's important for e-tailers to understand these circumstances and take action by re-targeting cart abandoners to remind them about their cart.

There are three main ways to do this:

A) Targeted Ads

Customers that land on your site leave behind online traces termed as “cookies”. You can track customers by analyzing cookies and place reminder ads whenever they search for products similar to yours.

For example, your PPC banner will appear on the browser of your customers to recapture their interest in purchasing.

E-Commerce website Koovs uses Pay Per Click (PPC) ads to for specific re-targeting.

B) E-mails

Still one of the most efficient acquisition tools - e-mail - ensures that your message reaches your audience and is seen. Sending reminder e-mails that are embedded with links to the item page can encourage action on customer's end. It's critical to send out reminder e-mails within 24 hours after cart abandonment, as conversion rates fall 50% after a day.

C) Personal Interactions

Simply calling them at an appropriate time (derived from conducting consumer research) can alert consumers to take action. Incorporating persuasive telemarketers with a pleasant voice tone can go a long way in convincing shoppers to stop what they’re doing and complete the purchase of the abandoned item.

3. Shorten checkout process

The majority of online shoppers abandon their carts during the checkout phase. The logistics involving the completion of online payments may take up a lot of the customers' time and drive them away from completing the payment. Filling information like payment terms, address, and personal information in separate pages might be too long of a process, especially if the customer is on their mobile phone or their connection is slow.

Make sure that your website’s entire purchase process takes less than 7 steps. For instance, Wal-Mart received countless complaints from their customers about their checkout process, which was ironically 7 steps. Ideally, the process should not take more than 4 pages.

The checkout process of the above e-commerce software can be completed in a few pages, with the customer only having to fill out information on one page.

It may sound like a tough task, but if you add these three ingredients to your e-commerce sales recipe, then you can expect to see your cart abandonment rates plummet. Not only that, you can expect your sales to increase due to the incorporation of free/flat rate shipping, shortened checkout process, and re-targeting cart abandoners.

While there can be various reasons to why an online shopper might abandon his/her cart, if e-commerce sites address the most common reasons to customer cart abandonment they can expect most cases to be reversed in a short time.

Robin is a Technical Support Executive. He is an expert in knowledge management and various knowledge base tools. Currently, he is a resident knowledge management expert at ProProfs. In his free time, Robin enjoys reading and traveling.

Getting the Most out of Cyber Monday

2017-11-02T15:30:00.000+02:00

With Cyber Monday less than month away, holiday season is quickly approaching. Last year on Cyber Monday, consumers spent nearly $3,5 billion according to Adobe Digital Insights. These results easily blew past initial estimates.

How this year will be? Well, if we take into account the ongoing increase in online sales, it looks that the pie has got big enough for every ecommerce player to take a bite.

In other words, it is the perfect time for you to drive traffic to your online store and make sales.

The deals on Cyber Monday are online only and generally offered by smaller retailers that cannot compete with the big retailers who do major clearances during Black Friday.

But, how to do this?

We asked successful retailers and experts to share their best tips on how they make the most out of Cyber Monday.

Let’s dive in.

Optimize your Website for Traffic

With all the offers and discounts, chances are (and the main goal) your website will see a high influx in traffic and you have to make sure that it can be handled. If customers can’t reach your site, they won’t complete their purchases. And if your site is too slow, it will leave a bad taste and discourage them to shop again.

“Only a one second delay on the website can make your Cyber Monday unprofitable”, warns Danyal Effendi from PureVPN. “Retailers should perform website stress-test and speed-test and consult their hosting/data-center providers for optimum service.”

Pro tip: Contact your hosting provider well in advance and even arrange a special deal for additional space in their servers.

Design Landing Pages

You’ve done great ads, drove traffic to your website but where do these visitors land? Your usual main site? Not a smart idea.

As Max Robinson, owner of FishTankBank stresses out, “ensure that your website makes it clear about the deals”.

Landing Pages (as otherwise known) are the best way to convert traffic into leads. It’s where you will send all your traffic that comes from social media ads, search engine marketing, or email newsletters.

A well-structured landing page that repeats the advertised offer will work as a reminder to your visitors and help you look consistent and trustworthy.

Successful retailers usually take advantage of this to offer a discount or membership in exchange for the customers’ email address. That way they can ensure they have a means to communicate with visitors, even if they didn’t end up making a purchase that day.

“If possible, create a banner that appears at the top of product pages, and maybe even do something fun like creating a new version of your logo”, continues Max. “Just try to make sure that the design changes you make don't interfere with the user experience on your site.”

Pro tip: Return policy and shipping schedule are two things that customers regularly check before they make a purchase (who wants to end up with a bad Christmas gift?) – so make sure that they are clearly laid out and can be easily found by your visitors.

Don’t wait until the last moment

Big retailers have dedicated marketing teams that handle promotions and they will probably have insane discounts that you can’t beat. Fear not though, there is still hope for you to take a share.

“Get in first before everyone else”, advises Adam Watson, marketing director from https://hollywoodmirrors.co.uk. “People waiting for Cyber Monday only have so much disposable income for presents; if you have a chance of beating your competition, take it and start early”.

Cyber Monday purchases are often intended for Christmas presents. Those presents (especially for close relationships) have high sentimental value, which also makes them very difficult to pick. People are often willing to pay a higher price for a more unique present, so getting their attention first might be a win-win scenario for both you and your satisfied customers.

Success on Cyber Monday is all about timing.

Share the right message

If you know a thing or two about marketing, you surely know how crucial (and difficult) it is to reach your leads and customers with the right message at the right time.

If you have set up any type of analytics throughout the year, now is their time to shine.

“The data from those is crucial on Cyber Monday”, says Jordan Harling, Head of Marketing at Roman Blinds Direct. “By looking to see when open-rates and conversions are at their highest you can craft a Cyber Monday email that’s guaranteed to create sales. Your users are already primed to purchase, all you need to do is give them a little nudge at the right time”.

Pro Tip: The average e-mail volume sent by brands saw a huge increase, with its peak being Thanksgiving Day. Start sending your newsletters before your customers’ inbox looks like a spam folder.

Prepare your team

There is so much pressure to beat the competition in offering better offers that other important aspects are often neglected.

One is how to address mishaps.

The period around Black Friday and Cyber Monday are generally extremely stressful for business owners and employees and the high traffic and demand often comes with unexpected issues.

“Preparing your team is just as important as readying the website and inventory and is crucial to a smooth holiday season”, warns Bart Mroz, co-founder and CEO of digital commerce consultancy SUMO Heavy. “It’s essential to have plenty of training sessions for your team members to make sure everyone is on the same page”.

Pro Tip: In times of panic, seminars and lessons are quickly forgotten, so having some tips or guidelines in list form in clear view for everyone, can be a lifesaver.

Offer Top Customer Service

More visitors, especially if they are not returning customers, means more questions. Especially if the terms of your promotions are not clearly laid out, your support inbox or your telephone line will see a rise in traffic.

Having a representative available to answer any emails, Facebook messages, and tweets concerning offers and discounts is crucial to provide a happy shopping experience.

“The best way is to hire part-time chat agents and create a shift plan with more agents at peak times”, advises us Danyal Effendi from PureVPN. “Try to provide 24/7 customer service with major focus on target markets.”

Pro tip: If your budget allows it, consider hiring a virtual assistant. That way, when you and your team members are sleeping, there will be someone from the other side of the globe, ready to answer customers’ questions.

Discount selected products

The good thing about Cyber Monday is that it is not expected to have a flat discount on all products across your website (or physical store). In fact, offering a discount on certain products can work as a great lure to see an overall increase in sales.

“Focus on specific product discounts, rather than large store wide discounting”, Adam Pearce, Co-founder and Marketing Director of Blend Commerce, advises his clients. “Running one or two products as a loss leader can help to drive traffic to your store. By grabbing this traffic, you can then upsell at checkout with lesser discounted products and drive up the profitability per customer”.

Pro Tip: Make sure to accompany the discounted products with the right keywords, to make the most out of your search engine marketing efforts.

Clear the inventory

Cyber Monday can be a great opportunity to re-evaluate your stock and clear inventory from products that move too slow (or not at all).

“I like to offer sales on older inventory that's been hard to move in the past”, shares his experience Robert Ellis from Massage Tables Now. “Offering these sales on older inventory helps me clear out my stock and get a head start on my ordering while offering something of real value to my customers.

When Cyber Monday arrives, Christmas will be just around the corner and we all know that during that time every inch of space matters. Having around out-fashioned, obsolete or unpopular products might give your store an outdated look.

At the same time, researchers also back up what you may have noticed from experience: too many choices might be debilitating for the customer, resulting in fewer purchases.

Pro tip: Use an inventory management system to make this process a piece of cake. With Megaventory you can create intuitive reports and easily push slow-moving products for sale.

Last but not least

Following some of the above tips will have a positive effect on the success of your Cyber Monday offers.

You should not forget, though, that your main goal from that day should be to create the base for ongoing relationships with new visitors and strengthen those with your older customers.

So, how will you make the most out of this year’s Cyber Monday? Share in the comments below or tweet us!

And if you like those tips, don’t forget to share this with your friends and colleagues.

How to invoice services in Megaventory

2017-10-23T12:30:00.000+03:00

Part of having a business that offers services along with their physical products is invoicing your clients for your services.

Especially in the B2B market, most companies require an invoice before they place a payment, making it rather crucial for the service provider to be able to generate an invoice quickly and properly.

In this article we cover how to invoice for services in Megaventory, track your service fees and include services in a work order.

How to track services

In Megaventory, a service is considered any non-physical product that is charged but there is no stock reduction when a sale is made.

Therefore, under the product type of "service", you can track delivery fees, installation costs, labor costs, or even your hourly rates if you are a designer, a lawyer, an engineer or any freelancer whatsoever.

Before starting invoicing your clients, your first step is to add your services as products in Megaventory.

Log in to your Megaventory account and go to Products. Sign up for an account here.
Click Add Product.
In the Product Type, select the option Service.
Fill out the other fields, including the Default Sales Price if you have a standard cost for this service.
Hit Insert to add it to your product list.

Pro Tip: If you offer your services for free, you can still include them in the invoice with a zero price.

Selling both services and products

For the sake of an example, let's imagine the following scenario: your company sells electric appliances such as air conditioners. As an added service you offer the installation of purchased appliances for an added cost, which has a flat fee.

The above is a sample invoice created within Megaventory. Headers and footers can be customized to include information like declamatory messages or QR codes, to make sure you give the right message to your customers.

Pro Tip: Especially for sales that the customer may need additional help after the purchase, it is advised to include info on how they can reach you best.

Checking stock availability

When it is time to send the products to the customer and you click to ship and invoice, you can see the stock availability of the items to check that everything is right (or not).

Next to the air conditioner, you can see that you have a product availability of 5. The box next to the installation fee, though, is empty. That happens because there is no physical restriction to how many times you can offer this service. Pretty convenient, right?

Managing manufacturing with services

If you are in the manufacturing industry, you may want to track the labor cost of a work order in order to calculate how much this product costs you.

This may be really helpful for Megaventory users that have pricing rules in place which automatically calculate the sales price of a product depending on its cost. For example, you can create a pricing rule for the sales prices of certain products to be the manufacturing cost + a 20%.

Back to services, let's see the scenario where you create custom-made shoes.

With the manufacturing module of Megaventory, you can track the leather - the raw material - and the service or labor cost of the professional shoemaker as different parts of the work order.

Again, next to the leather you can see the product availability in the selected inventory location, while there is no number next to the Shoemaker's Cost.

Are you a manufacturer?
Keep track of the manufacturing process with Megaventory
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Now that you know how to invoice for services in Megaventory, you can easily bill your clients and partners. Importing your standard service fees in your account will save you time to do the thing you love more as an entrepreneur: run your business.

Why You Should Integrate Online Tactics Into Your Brick and Mortar Retail Shop

2017-10-05T16:30:00.000+03:00

This is a guest post by guest contributor Mitch Pazanski

Shopping at traditional brick and mortar stores might be a lot of fun, but shopping online can be far more convenient. When we’re slumped on the sofa after a long day at work, we can just pop online, do a bit of searching and make a few purchases.

It’s so much easier than getting into the car, driving through the traffic and finding a parking spot before we’ve even arrived at a physical store.

The numbers are in: Over 70% of shoppers think they’ll find a better deal online, while 60% of American shoppers don’t like shopping in crowded stores.

However, not all is lost. 56% of online stores still have a brick and mortar store because they know people continue to enjoy the brick and mortar shopping experience. As Forbes points out, brick and mortar stores don’t need to die - they just need to evolve.

Let’s take a look at why you should integrate online tactics into your brick and mortar retail shop.

The Millennials Are Here, And They Want More Buying Options

Millennials have grown up during an epoch in history that is defined by technology. Consequently, they’re the group of shoppers that are using tech the most. They have grown using brick and mortar stores and online eCommerce stores - and expect to be able to enjoy the best of both these worlds with every shopping experience they have. This is why improving and expanding your business with online tactics is essential, if you are to keep the millennial shopper happy. They use numerous devices to make purchases, with their mobile phones now essentially acting as digital wallets. Moreover, Generation Z are hot on the heels of the millennials - and they’re growing up fast.

Once Online, You Can Understand Your Customer Better

One of the problems faced by a brick and mortar store is that you don’t really get a good chance to understand your customers needs extremely well. According to a survey carried out by RetailDive, no more than 43% of customers are willing to share information after they’ve made a purchase in a physical store.

This means you still don’t know over 50% of your customers. As such, you can’t personalize their shopping experience.

Online is a different story. You can use Artificial Technology to better understand your customers and their buying habits. This is important. Faced with so many buying options and sales channels, the 21st-century shopper is becoming harder and harder to understand.

AI presents you with data on consumer habits that you can then analyze and make good use of. This will help you to keep up with your competitors who are also trying to understand their customer. You can understand your own performance metrics online better too, including what your customers are searching for once they’re in your online store.

Enhanced Customer Experience

For your customers to like your brand, you need to treat them well by delivering a personalized experience. As mentioned above, AI can help with that.

AI also enhances the customer experience in ways that help to build your online presence, thus bolstering the reputation of your business as a whole. The more personalized you make the shopping experience, the more likely it is that a customer will be satisfied and retained.

Chatbots can help. Nothing more than a piece of software which chats to your customers, chatbots are on-hand to listen to the customer and offer them relevant information that improves their experience and nudges them towards a crucial sale.

The best thing? Chatbots learn the habits of your customers and know them far better than you ever could.

Your Customers Can Order Online And Pick Up In-Store

One of the best online tactics you should integrate is in-store pickup. Why? It’s booming. It’s been popular since US and UK customers were quizzed about it back in 2012.

Another reason why you should integrate this online tactic is because it’s worth noting that people like to research their options online. It saves them time, it means they can easily reserve a product, and even if they don’t buy, they might head on down to your store anyway.

If you go down the route of adding in-store pickup, you’ll need to keep on top of your inventory, both online and offline. There are inventory management apps that help you synch and monitor your product across numerous sales channels. As soon as you sell a product, the apps automatically update your inventory.

To recap, unless you integrate online tactics into your brick and mortar store, you’ll miss out on a huge chunk of your targeted audience. The tactics don’t take long to master, and once learned, they will help you expand your business.

Mitch Pazanski is head of the art department at MightySkins, a company that leads the internet in custom designed skins for your devices. He helps design the DJI Mavic skins offered by the company.

New feature: Romanian language in Megaventory

2017-09-28T16:30:00.000+03:00

We're once again excited to announce that we've upgraded our language package with a new language: Romanian! You can find the live version either from the gear icon in your Megaventory account or here.

Both the application itself, which offers the possibility of running a business, as well as the website containing detailed information about the features of the system are translated and accessible to all Romanian speakers.

Available Languages

From now on you can manage your inventory in one of the 8 available languages (English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, German, Greek, Arabic, and Romanian). Also, we will like to remind you that any admin user can localize their Megaventory account both to the language they prefer but also to the specific industry terminology - or indeed the preferred terms used in the particular business.

It is highly important for us to help you manage your business operations in the language you feel most comfortable. So, if Megaventory is not yet available in your native language, send us an e-mail or tweet us!

Why try Megaventory

Megaventory serves clients in more than 40 countries around the world specializing in companies across many industries, in retail, wholesale, manufacturing or even services. If we can help so many business owners, we can help you too!

The platform is constantly upgraded and expanded, providing access to the latest available technical how-to. In a constantly changing global market, you need to be at top of your game.

Megaventory can be integrated with various applications like Magento and WooCommerce and prices start just from USD 9.90 per month!

Now that it is available in Romanian, shouldn't you give it a try?

Sign up for a free trial of Megaventory in Romanian today!

Get started now » Signup is FREE. No Credit Card Required

Selling or Purchasing on Consignment using Megaventory

2017-09-22T16:30:00.000+03:00

Selling on consignment is a useful arrangement that allows a supplier and usually a retailer to create a “win-win” situation, where they both share part of the risk of holding inventory.

Consignment occurs when the consignor (the supplier) sends goods to a consignee (the retailer), who later sells them to their clients. The goods remain under the legal ownership of the supplier and the retailer is required to pay for them only after they have been sold to customers. Any leftover stock can be returned back to the supplier without facing any monetary penalties.

Consignment Accounting

From an accounting point of view, when the consignor sends goods to the consignee, there is no need to create an accounting entry related to the physical movement of the products. It is usually sufficient to record the change in location within the inventory record keeping system of the consignor.

At the same time, the consignee should keep track of the products in their own inventory management system to be able to easily create a purchase invoice for the consignor when some of the received products are sold.

What is in it for the consignor

The business owner that decides to sell on consignment can have some great benefits from a consignment arrangement. As long as logistics are considered, the inventory costs are reduced because less storage space is needed, which can be a great relief for their budget. At the same time, manufacturers can easier sell their products and reach a wider customer audience. Store owners are usually reluctant to purchase products from less widely-known brands, and a consignment arrangement might ease their fears that they may get stuck with an unsellable inventory.

Nevertheless, certain disadvantages of this model should not be overlooked. Lack of visibility on products, especially slow-moving or dead ones, can have a negative effect on the finances of the consignor. The retailer is not pressed to move the slow moving products by applying sales and offers and the supplier might end up with large quantities of antiquated and unsellable inventory.

In other words, it is a risky arrangement, a double edge sword, that can allow a new brand to get into more retail channels, but at the same time, if the retailer is not actually selling the products, your inventory investment as a consignor might not generate a return.

What is in for the consignee

The retailer who chooses to purchase products on consignment can see great profit in this model. Without the risk of paying for the stock they replenish, consignees are able to offer a wider selection of products.

Even if cash flow is slow in a given period of time, they can still have products to sell on their shelves.

Make the most out of consignment

While selling on consignment can be a highly beneficial situation for many businesses, it can have some serious disadvantages for the consignee if the arrangement has not been made on solid ground.

One such example is to have a common agreement (or not) on who is responsible for destroyed or returned products. This needs to be clear for both parties before suppliers bring their products to the retailer’s warehouse or store. Even if the original price of the products is relatively low and this seems unnecessary, a clear arrangement will reduce misunderstandings and conflicts.

In any case, the consignor and consignee have a great opportunity to support each other in a highly antagonistic business world. If both parties are feeling positive about the agreement, they can even take it a step further and follow a common marketing plan to increase sales against their competitors.

In order to enable this setting in place, an inventory management system can help achieve the desired level of transparency between the two parties that will assist the growth of their collaboration.

Consignment in Megaventory

Handling consignment sales in Megaventory is super easy.

From the consignor' s perspective you just need to create a Sales Order where the goods are shipped out in one stepped and you create invoices in a second step as required.

The consignee's approach is similar with the only difference being that they create a Purchase Order.

At any point then it is possible to create a filter which shows the number of orders which are to be handled with consignment and their state.

Once the bookmark card is available it can be used to filter just the Sales Orders which need processing under consignment.

It's that simple and user-friendly!

Conclusion

Consignment is an important model, cost-effective, potential, risks too. When handled properly it can be an efficient tool for business growth. It has its pitfalls but it's also worth exploring. Are you interested in becoming a consignor or consignee?

See below how you can start an account to streamline the process!

Get started now » Signup is FREE. No Credit Card Required

New Feature: Batch & Multi-Level Work Order Actions

2017-09-04T16:30:00.000+03:00

You asked and we listened. Work Orders have become more powerful than ever with the ability to manage multi-level and batch work orders with the click of a button.

Work orders are an essential communications part of manufacturing businesses. They inform your operations team that certain products are needed and give the green light to production.

Megaventory Work Orders, though, are so versatile that can also be used by non-manufacturing businesses that need to track processes like unboxing, repurposing product’s parts into other products, maintaining and repairing damaged inventory, and many other tasks.

With the new upgrade, these tasks become much easier to perform, saving you valuable time and preventing duplication of effort.

So, how the updated work orders can help you?

Multiple actions with the hit of a button

Let’s imagine the story of Carol who is creating cakes for her bakery. She buys flour and other ingredients in large sacks that come in different sizes and weights but the ingredients in her recipes are in grams or ounces. How can she measure what she has available for production without doing a mathematical equation every time?

With Megaventory, it’s a piece of cake (no pun intended).

First of all, Carol needs to create a Work Order that will turn the product “5kg sack of flour” to the product “1g of flour”. In that way, the first “material” will create 5,000 finished products. And she will continue to do so for the other ingredients.

The next work order will be to turn the finished products she just created to another finished product, the “cake”. By creating a Bill of Materials, which is basically the recipe that guides Carol on what ingredients to use and in what quantity, she can easily do this Work Order again and again.

With the new upgrade, you can do all the above actions automatically with the hit of a button.

As shown in the following screenshot, when you click on the gear icon next to the work order number, a list of available options pops up. If production has moved faster than how often you update your Megaventory account and ordered products are already finished you can now click on Allocate Components AND Receive Finished Goods or Allocate Components AND Receive Finished Goods AND Close Work Order. This is also helpful if you are unboxing items to sell them individually and the time between the creation of the work order and its completion is seconds.

Simultaneously update Batch Work Orders

On top of being able to perform multiple actions with one click, the user of Megaventory is now able to simultaneously update batch Work Orders. To do this, just select the orders you want to update and then click on Batch Update.

After that, the following a pop-up window will show up and prompt you to select the actions you want to perform. While here, it is also possible to rearrange the order in which the following orders will be completed.

Every one of the above actions will have an immediate effect on your inventory. If you receive the finished goods, this will automatically update the available stock of the related products and allow you to fulfill a pending sales order. If you select to allocate components, these will not be available to be used in other work orders.

In other words, what the batch update does is that the appropriate action will be applied to all the selected work orders or if there is not enough stock, it will stop and inform you so.

Back to the story of Carol, our baker can use this advanced feature to simultaneously unbox all of the ingredients needed and create her cake.

The above functionality can also help businesses that manufacture more complex products such machines, computers, and so on, where calculating mistakes can cause serious delays and problems in production. And since there is no theoretical limit to the levels of manufacturing you can include the production flows that can be designed can be very detailed.

But why use a work order software?

If you are not using an ERP system already, you may think that you are good with your pen and paper, or spreadsheets. Such techniques can result in production mistakes and the truth is that nothing is worse than telling a customer that their order will be delayed.

Such incidents can jeopardize your chances of acquiring regular customers that do repeating sales from you. At the same time, the more you delay finishing an order, the more inventory you need to keep in your warehouse or factory, which actually costs you money.

An inventory management system will help automate your work orders so that you can meet the demands of your customer more easily. It will help you know what you have in stock so you don’t run out of inventory when you’re making products. If you do run out, the multilevel manufacturing module will allow you to identify which manufacturing step can't go ahead and you need to buy stock.

And don't forget that with Megaventory you can create purchase orders in just a few clicks!

Using Megaventory for managing your manufacturing work is much more affordable than other online software solutions in the ERP industry. It’s a great fit for small and midsize businesses because of its price and flexible feature set. With this added feature?

Sign up for a free trial of Megaventory today!

Get started now » Signup is FREE. No Credit Card Required