Less than three hours to the start of a new year. Here are some random thoughts from the last week of 2006.
2006 was a great year for our business, we were very lucky to help more customers and provide better products, better service, and all at a better price. Here is how we did it.
Inventory Status
A lot of effort went into automating the back office. Inventory levels are now tracked in the system and linked directly to our website. A customer views the prices AND number of items in stock before placing his or her order. This feature is very convenient for customers as they can tell if their order will ship next business day or they will have to wait for a month to get it.
PO Automation
Another biggie was purchase order automation. This is a back office automation that allowed us to extract PO information from the accounting system into a plain excel sheet AND place the product photo along each line item. This greatly reduced data entry errors and facilitated communication with our suppliers. Customers do not directly see this feature of course, but they do benefit from faster order fulfillment and reduce errors.
Product Reviews
We added a product review section for each item we sell. Any site visitor can submit a product review by filling in review section below the item details and hitting the submit button. The review is recorded in a database and we are notified by email. The review is published on the item page after it is approved. We decided to publish all reviews, positive and negative, as we believe they provide a great resource for potential buyers and help them make informed buying decisions. The approval process is meant to filter out spam reviews.
Live Site Update
This is a cool feature where we refresh the site with current inventory status. How is this different from the inventory automation point above? well, in addition to updating inventory counts, we also temporarily delete items that are out of stock. So if someone buys the last GPB003 perfume bottle it will be deleted from the site with the next update. Why? while we didn’t validate this with any scientific method, we think that a customer browsing less choices but all shipping next business day is more likely to convert as compared to browsing more of items with some out-of-stocks. I would like very much to ready any studies on that subject, please drop me a comment if you can recommend some good reads.
What is in for 2007?
I am sure every small business owner has this question on their mind. The answer can be more success, more profitability, better margins, … For us, it is providing better value to the customer by aligning our merchandising and presentation to what the customer wants and expects.
Happy New Year to all our readers.
General happy new year