What is Multichannel retailing?

Multichannel sales entail engaging multiple mediums to sell the merchandise to the end-users. A company can sell its products through physical stores, telephone, email, catalogues, own website, e-commerce sites and comparison shopping sites.

Multichannel E-commerce Retailing

The e-commerce multi-channels such as social media, shopping carts, comparison shopping sites, marketplaces and company websites all act as various mediums for the consumers to reach out to their desired product or a brand.

The studies on sales volume generated by multiple and single channel mediums show that the sales revenues almost doubled through multi-channel retailing than selling through a single channel.

An intelligently employed multi-channel sales strategy doubles up to support an omnichannel retail ecosystem for the company. Multi-channel approach to reach customers not only ensure creating constant touch with the customers to provide consistent shopping experience but also pulls back the customers for a repeat purchase.

A multi-channel e-commerce platform creates ample opportunities for the company to take its products to their end-users in a meaningful way.

The advantages of enabling multi-channel sales of your brands are many. But what is equally or more important is how you handle the large order and inventory volume at the back end. Unless your system is ready to handle that kind of quantity, having a multichannel retailing strategy as your marketing plan, will boomerang with customer dissatisfaction and hamper the brand image. Thus, reducing your market!

Managing sales from various marketplaces, maintaining optimum inventory so that you neither face stockouts nor oversell, error-free processing of orders in bulk, tracking differentiated pricing across all the channels are extremely daunting tasks a multi-channel platform should handle seamlessly with ease.

In the absence of an integrated multichannel management software solution, you will have to bear a massive burden of operations cost to manage inventories and billing for different channels, warehouses, order processing and shipping, vendor management and customer service management. (learn more)