Anyone who has ever tried to create their own webshop knows that this is a long and complicated process. It seems simple at first, you need to provide a list of products with descriptions and images, reach an agreement on the design of the website, enter payment options and that should be it, right?
The problem is already apparent at step one, an employee has to invest a lot of time into compiling a list of all products with their specific product codes, prices, available quantities, descriptions, variations (both color variations and technical variations) and high resolution photos. This has to be done by a person who is very familiar with the products. This means that it is not possible to have an untrained employee do the job. On top of all that the person compiling the list also has to attend to her other daily tasks which puts a lot of stress on the person.
When the list is submitted there is usually a problem with missing information. Most of the time an agreement is reached that the missing information will be filled in later (even though this rarely happens). After that, the list goes through additional analysis and is often returned to the client for additional corrections of the data.
When all this is done, the data is imported into the webshop.
Before or during the process of data collection, you will have to spend time participating in the design of your webshop which is a whole story for itself. We will skip this part and say that the design was successfully determined
What a lot of people miss when thinking about getting a webshop is changes to the product information that occur. What if the supplier happens to change the prices and you have to change prices for several hundred or thousand products on the shop? What if you have to delete some products from sale or add new products? How do you easily make changes to prices and images?
When the customer orders something through your webshop, is it automatically entered in your system or do you have to retype the order in order to make an invoce (or offer)? Does the customer have an option to log into your webshop and have the ability to review their complete transaction history?
There are some of the key functionalities that anyone who even thinks about creating a web shop should think about.
With Toscana ERP we offer a generated web shop. This means that if you use our system to run your business and it already contains all of your products along with their descriptions, prices, pictures which you can use when making offers. The same items can be displayed on you webshop without requiring additional administration.
This guarantees significant time savings because all of the products are updated in the same place, you can easily choose which categories and products you want to show on the webshop, highlight, put on sale, etc.
Changing any information is very simple and fast, and it is even possible to automatically import and update product prices according to the supplier's price list if it is available.
Your customers also get some benefits from this, they get an interface where the price is automatically calculated by selecting a product. They also have the option to register, which grants you the ability to give targeted discounts for certain customers.
Once the order is sent through the webshop it ends up directly in your e-mail and your ERP system where your employee generates an offer or an invoice in a single click. All the actions performed towards the client are also automatically recorded in the clients’ contact card and are available from every location and any device.