In today’s eCommerce world, brands no longer have the option NOT to sell on retailers. In order to succeed, they must meet their customer where they are – online!
But with these marketplaces and department stores come the frustration of manual retail connections – a real pain point that brands must overcome. Let’s take a look at the Top 3 pain points and how to overcome them.
Top 3 Manual Integration Pain Points
- Connectivity and Integration: The process of selling on marketplaces and department stores can be extremely time-consuming – often taking anywhere from 4-9 months for one retail connection.
- Daily Operations: The day-to-day operations and management of brand-to-retail operations can be taxing. Dealing with items such as streamlining product data, imagery, mapping, taxonomy, inventory syncing, orders, billing, tracking, and returns put a strain on daily work.
- Long Integrations: The systems and data formats that brands and retailers use don’t all speak the same language. This can cause extremely long integrations. Just because one connection has already been made, doesn’t mean that it will transfer to other systems. Many times, the process must be manually set all over again.
Without automation, brands must hire an in-house team to manually manage these operations, making it less cost-effective. And while some brands use EDI connections, there are still large amounts of manual work required. In most cases, operations, product, and sales teams need to manually update all line sheets, product data, and image adjustments for each and every retail connection.
Inability for Growth
At some point in the growth stage one of two things will happen. Brands will immediately understand that the only possible way for growth is through automation or additional resources will be required (time, money spent, recruitment). Without automation, brands either do not have the resources or are forced to settle for a specific set of retailers with little ability for growth.
Seamless Connections
It is no longer a question of whether you should expand your digital sales strategy, it is how you do it. One connection with Cymbio provides quick and seamless scalability, eliminating manual integration pain points and getting you up and started quickly and easily.