With the Holiday season just over the horizon and Black Friday peeking at you from behind the curtains, now might seem like the exact wrong time to try to implement an ecommerce option for your customers. However, setting up an ecommerce option for QuickBooks has never been easier for manufacturing and wholesale businesses.
For manufacturing and wholesale businesses, QuickBooks has always been a bit of a staple, but providing a quality, well-designed, easy-to-use ecommerce option wasn’t always straightforward or easy.
Sure, there were plenty of ecommerce options out there, but even when they meshed well with QuickBooks (which few did easily in the early days), the resulting options were rarely designed for B2B businesses — it was a shopping cart type setup that was more appropriate for selling to the end user.
Thankfully, times have changed, and it’s never been easier to set up an ecommerce solution for your customers that meets their needs and makes their lives easier.
The Holidays Are Coming — Keep Your Customers Happy in the Coming Stressful Months
In fact, you’re probably already deep in the busy season. Your customers are making more orders, more often, and those orders are often more complex.
If you’ve been stuck in the old way of receiving customers orders, you know that this time of year can be especially difficult. At no other time is it critical to get orders right, to have them ready on time, and to be able to reorder in a simple and straightforward fashion. Stress levels are high, and your customers are often dealing with the millions of tiny details required to prepare for their customers.
You might be thinking, “Now is not the time to introduce a new ordering option!”
Oh, but it is. We wrote an article a few weeks back that argued this exact point — if you choose the right ecommerce option for your customers, setting up that option and having it ready when crunch time hits can make all the difference in the world.
What Matters Most Is Showing Your Customers You Care
It’s certainly possible that providing an ecommerce option is something your customers won’t latch onto right away, something they might wait until the season dies down to check out. More than immediate adoption, what matters is that, by providing this option and telling your customers that you’re introducing a new option for the busiest portion of the season, you’re showing your customers that you care. You’re demonstrating that you’re adding value to your offering, and you can potentially bring some of your customers on board with the new system right away.
Whether or not your customers decide to try your new online ordering system depends partly on the customers and partly on you. Age often plays an outsized role in whether or not a customer is interested in/willing to try out a new ordering method.
You may find that some of your younger contacts have been itching to make online orders and are all too happy to learn the system themselves. You may also find resistance among older contacts.
But these are generalizations, not rules — it is very possible that, if you provide a few simple, free training options, that your customers will happily take up the new ordering option and begin placing new orders online right away.
Speed and Ease Are What Your Customers Want in Ordering — Ecommerce Makes That Possible
The ordering process, can set you up for failure if you don’t have an ecommerce option.
One of the best features of online ordering systems is that you can ensure that , when your customers log into your system and their customer portal they only see, the precise products you have available, along with inventory levels and pricing that’s unique to them.
Why does that matter?
Because your customers are only seeing the data you want them to see.
You don’t have to worry about a rep giving an incorrect price, a customer finding out about (or trying to purchase) a product that’s already slated for someone else, or a myriad of other issues that can arise when your customers are seeing data that’s not meant for them.
Further, you can rest assured that your customers aren’t going to forget what products are available to them, the stuff you want them to see.
Every time they log in to their customer portal to make a purchase (assuming you’ve gone with ecommerce software that provides this option), your customers are going to see every possible product available for them to purchase.
We’ve done our best to incorporate this into Now Commerce — the customer portal is fully customizable. That means you set the prices, you set the inventory levels, you choose what’s available for purchase and what’s not.
You don’t even have to set all those things up separately. They’re automatically populated from the QuickBooks settings you’re already using.
This allows you to easily manage multiple customers and prevent ordering conflicts or mistakes.
Watch This Video of the Customer Portal in Action
To see what your customers would see and how simple Now Commerce makes ordering for them, click the link below to watch the free video.
On the page below, you’ll be able to see how Now Commerce also provides a rep portal, integrates with QuickBooks Desktop, and can even be used to send orders to a warehouse.
