Multichannel Selling Challenges: Creating a Unified Customer Brand Experience

In today’s e-commerce, a brand no longer controls the customer’s experience from start to purchase to delivery. A customer might explore a brand’s products in any number of virtual or physical stores, ultimately purchasing through a different channel altogether. How can a brand create and maintain a consistent experience across all channels and touchpoints?

And then there’s the retailer’s challenge of managing the logistics of numerous, diverse selling channels. Each virtual store and marketplace has different communication and integration requirements, requiring considerable time and labor to keep track of them all.

The Osa Collaborative Visibility Platform is a brand’s solution to managing this complex selling environment of sites, virtual marketplaces, and physical stores. This e-commerce software, which includes an Integration Manager Hub, a Warehouse Management System hub, and a Fulfillment hub consolidates all channel management onto one platform, giving brands visibility of orders, product inventory and fulfillment at all times, across all selling channels, in one centralized view. This technology is an ideal omnichannel retail solution.

Let’s look at three top brand challenges and how the Unified Commerce Platform can help.

Challenge #1: Creating and maintaining a unified customer experience across channels

How can a retailer create a consistent buying experience in a virtual store, a big box retailer site, or on an e-commerce marketplace?

Solution:

A platform that consolidates and delivers consistent information about products and availability to customers, and ensures seamless order execution and fulfillment.

Using the Unified Commerce Platform, a brand can manage its many selling channels, and ensure customers receive real time information about products, availability, and pricing across all of them.

When a brand has a consolidated backend platform, a customer will have a unified experience on the front end, no matter where they are shopping.

Challenge #2: Communication and integration of all selling channels

A brand looking to grow can add virtual marketplaces and increase sales; the more selling channels, the more selling opportunities. But additional channels mean more management and integration complexity, requiring much more time and management.

Each marketplace has different seller requirements, product packaging and SKU listings, and fulfillment requirements which are hard for a retailer to keep track of. Brands must understand and follow each marketplace’s rules and principles, creating an overwhelming amount of extra work. Not to mention the integration headaches of selling on multiple platforms. Managing multiple channels takes up valuable time from sellers worrying constantly about the day-to-day operations.

Solution:

With the Unified Commerce Platform, the seller can manage all e-commerce channels in one place. Retailers can focus on building brands, not on managing channels.

As an example, each marketplace has different attribute requirements for products sold on their site. Using this unified commerce solution, a seller can input its product catalogue one time, and the system will then propagate product details to each marketplace based on its required attributes. Without this tool, the seller must upload its catalogue to each site individually, supplying each’s required information.

A seller can define “rules” for each channel — what items to sell, at what price, from which inventory. The business can set different prices in different markets under one SKU, without needing to manage multiple SKUs for the same product. Through the dashboard, a brand can manage products and inventory across channels in one centralized place.

Challenge #3: Order execution and fulfillment across channels

How can a brand maintain its identity and customer experience through fulfillment of the order, across various combinations of selling channels and fulfillment methods?

Solution: 

The Unified Commerce Platform provides order visibility for every order, no matter the origin or fulfillment method.

Any combination of orders and fulfillment is visible in the portal. An order might be placed through the brand’s own virtual store and fulfilled through Amazon. Or an Etsy order might be fulfilled by the seller itself. Click on the order and see every step of order execution — from warehouse, shipping tracking, to actual shipping label. Even orders placed and fulfilled through Amazon or big box retailers are visible at every step.

A seller can “opt in” to tools for additional benefits: These tools determine the best way to orchestrate an order based on origin and destination, inventory, nearest fulfillment center, and most cost-efficient shipping carrier. The system scans shipping carriers’ estimates and selects the most cost effective and efficient option.

The Data Order Management Hub tracks all orders in one place, facilitates forecasting and inventory management.

A retailer can manage inventory at a global level, allocating according to channel demand. The system automatically pulls from unallocated “virtual” inventory when necessary, so a seller never misses an order. And on the customer end, buyers are always receiving consistent and accurate product availability information, no matter which channel they’re shopping on.

Brands also can utilize portal tools to facilitate day-to-day business tasks like invoice generation, tax reports, and forecasting.

Osa handles operational challenges and enables brands to focus on building their brand and cultivating customer relationships.