While few businesses would contest the importance of eCommerce as a delivery channel for their business, in general, Maltese companies are still compromising on their eCommerce activities building sites which are separate from their back-end inventory and accounting systems.
Such non-integrated eCommerce solutions involve manual transferring of data from the company’s inventory system, usually using Microsoft Excel™, for stock control or to manage price changes. Equally, sales effected on the eCommerce site result in reports being generated or data downloaded for manual or semi-automated stock importing into the inventory and accounting system at a later stage. This is not suggested.
While this type of set-up may be valid, when a company is first testing the waters of eCommerce or while volumes are very small, it is not very suitable as a foundation for the growth of eCommerce as a significant channel for a company’s sales. Apart from the low productivity offered by such a manual approach, an eCommerce solution which is not integrated to the back-end results in slower response to customers as well as an environment fraught with weak controls and thus the possibility of fraud.
The Shireburn eStore, a module of the Shireburn Business Suite, addresses these very issues. Stock details are centrally managed both for delivery via the eCommerce eStore as well as for traditional channels. The Shireburn eStore supports central stock management of more detailed descriptions for each stock card, technical specifications, multiple images and attachments per item, products in multiple categories with categorisation for the web optionally being different from the off-line sales and support for products on one web site from multiple companies (useful for a group of companies). Sales effected on-line result in the automatic generation of sales orders in the Shireburn Inventory Management System and the subsequent automated workflows of billing, inventory tracking and statistics.
To discuss an integrated, holistic approach to eCommerce as a part of your business processes call us on 2131 9977 or go to www.shireburn.com/eCommerce.