Manual vs. Automatic E-commerce

E-commerce has become quite popular with the advent of online stores and shopping carts. It’s possible to manage your inventory listed on a number of e-commerce websites manually or automatically, and we’re going to delve into which one will most likely work better for your company.

Manual:

If you sell products on multiple e-commerce channels, when you make a sale on one you may have to manually update the inventory quantities in stock across all of the other channels. The quantities are listed independently of each other, but they all come from the same place: your warehouse.

Problems:

One of the biggest downsides of this kind of setup is that if you don’t update your available quantities quick enough, you could accidentally double-sell items. The same items could be committed to two separate orders made on different websites, such as Amazon and eBay. This will leave someone disappointed when you’re forced to delay delivery of the promised products.

Automatic:

Tying all of your e-commerce channels together into a central hub, such as Fishbowl Commerce, is a better solution than trying to manage them all separately. You can schedule updates of inventory quantities across your various e-commerce accounts as many times as you like on a daily basis. In addition, Fishbowl Commerce can automatically send e-commerce orders to the main accounting software to begin the order fulfillment process and quickly generate tracking numbers and other data.

Solutions:

A business automation platform doesn’t completely eliminate the danger of double-selling, but it does significantly reduce it. The time between a sale and the automatic update is generally going to be much shorter than if you tried to make all of the changes manually, one by one. It also ensures the right quantities make it into each of your accounts because you won’t run the risk of making typos when entering those numbers.