3 Benefits of Integrating Your Inventory and B2B eCommerce Solutions 

As a wholesale distributor, you know how complicated running an eCommerce store is. There is always something to do. Looking for suppliers, fulfilling orders, and marketing your products are but a small fraction of your daily workload. Often, you feel stuck keeping things afloat rather than actively growing your business.

But there is a better way to do things: automation. Or in other words, let technology deal with the dull parts of the business.

Back before computers took over, you had to do everything manually. Those were the days of keeping closets and drawers stocked with customer and sales archives, as well as inventory numbers. It was horrific, especially when you had to recover data from said archives. Or, heaven forbid, anything got lost.

Luckily, these days are long gone. Now you have a new companion to rely on that enables you to focus on the parts of your business that you want. You can do this by integrating your inventory with a modern B2B eCommerce solution.

The importance of eCommerce inventory integration

For a B2B eCommerce business to be successful, all its moving parts must work in tandem. When the business grows, so does the system's complexity. Without proper management, the chance of costly mistakes increases. While minor on their own, these mistakes can add up and cause your business to break down and close.

With automation, you can streamline your business processes while reducing complexity. Instead of relying on humans (who are prone to mistakes), you can use an integration API to plug into your inventory system. The result is a system that works for you instead of you working for the system.

By automating through integration, you can reallocate resources to grow your business without spiraling complexity. Let’s see how an inventory integration can benefit your business.

1. Save time, energy, and money through automation

When you start your business, you’re usually in the “good enough” phase. You have few customers, so keeping their data scattered across notebooks, emails, and spreadsheets is good enough. You have a tiny inventory, so updating it by hand is good enough. You use few programs and apps to keep things running, so dealing with them is good enough.

But what’s good enough at the beginning becomes a bottleneck when your business starts growing. Automation is a key component of removing this bottleneck. Here’s how:

• It saves you time—software can do all sorts of calculations and update your inventory accordingly. This is something that took you minutes, if not hours, to do. You can instead spend that time on tasks that are more valuable. Let the software do the menial job for you.
• It saves you energy—keeping manual track of your inventory is not only time-consuming but also deadly dull. What happens when someone places an order on your website? You need to look up their contact info, ship them the order, update your inventory numbers, and do the related accounting. With a robust B2B order management system in place, you don’t have to do any of that.  
• It saves you money—with an expanding and ever-changing inventory, keeping manual track of it gets exponentially more expensive. You need to hire more people for it, train them, and also account for mistakes during the process. But our software doesn’t care if it has to deal with 100 or 10,000 different products in your catalog; it’ll keep doing its job. 

Thanks to automation, you can redirect these resources to growing your business instead of working in it.

2. Leverage inventory metrics for sales and marketing campaigns

Another advantage of centralizing your data in a single automated hub is better insight into your customer data. 

For instance, you can identify your best customers. These companies make a huge part of your revenue and are long-time buyers of your products. Do everything in your power to keep them that way. Offer them discounts or special deals. Give them exclusive access to high-ticket items that could help their business. Nurture your business relationship, and they’ll stay a loyal customer for a lifetime.

Knowing who your best customers are comes with another perk. You can look for other similar businesses and sell them your products. It’s likely they’ll enjoy them just as much. 

Product data is important too. Which products are selling well? Can you find more people who could benefit from them? Or maybe you can look into offering a higher-quality version of them. On the other hand, you can determine which products to cut from your catalog if they’re underperforming.

With better data, you can create marketing campaigns that target the right people and increase sales. This, in turn, drives down advertising costs, letting you enjoy better margins on your sales. You can then reinvest the extra money into your business to scale it further and continue the growth cycle. 

3. Refocus your resources on serving customers

Automation boils down to one thing: better serving your customers. All the money, time, and energy you save can be redirected toward improving how your business helps your customers.

Instead of going crazy over missing data and combing through hundreds of emails to retrieve customer information, you can focus on growing your business. Your employees will be more productive too, as they won’t be stuck with humdrum tasks. Leverage their talents by assigning them meaningful work and enjoy the extra job satisfaction and productivity.

Unlocking all of these extra resources will transform your business quickly. With lower costs and better revenue, you’ll find your balance sheet to be in its best shape ever. With a healthy balance sheet, you can reinvest more into your business, turning it into a self-sustaining machine.

Integrate your inventory management processes with B2B Wave

Why? This way, you can save resources and redirect them into higher-value activities that will make your business thrive. Afraid your current inventory tracking solution doesn’t work with B2B Wave? Our platform supports integrations with Brightpearl, Zoho Inventory, and DEAR Inventory.

Still unsure? Request a free 14-day trial today to see our integrations in action and enjoy your productivity boost.