3 Ways to Choose the Right Solution
You have a website, with its own store, sell on Amazon or ebay and want to grow. What solution do you use to manage that growth? Here’s 3 key tips:
Identify your Pain Points
A good salesperson will look for pain points like a dentist searching for a bad tooth. You will know yours when you find them. They hurt. A common one we hear from etailers is managing inventory across all the places they sell. (See more in our online form).
Your pain points may be the tasks that take lots of time, costs you too much money to do or makes it hard for your business to grow and make a profit. Write down what is holding you back and you hope to overcome with new technology. Then look for the solution(s) that address those.
Create an RFP
A Request for Proposal is a list of features you need in a new solution. Once you know your pain points you can draft an RFP to give to prospective vendors and see if they can address your specific needs (i.e., fix your pain). Watch out for YES answers. You want specifics on HOW their solution handles your needs. In our etailer example above a solution would be a simultaneous upload of inventory quantities every X minutes.
Make a Plan
It takes time to find the right solution. Then comes the hard part – getting it up and running. You will need an implementation plan and a project manager or team to ensure it goes smoothly. Do not leave it to the vendor. They will do their best but need you to help guide them and carry some of the workload. Implementations can take weeks or months. Be prepared to work hard and conduct weekly status meetings. Test and sign off on phases only when you are comfortable they work.
Conclusion
You’ve been tasked to find a “system” to manage all your business. It’s a daunting task and you don’t know where to begin. There are hundreds, even thousands of solutions and the amount of research required is overwhelming.
At Cleerly we have over 20 years experience and an in depth knowledge of ecommerce and the solutions that support it. We can help you narrow your search to a handful of solutions at no cost to you. How do we do it? When you follow the links in our recommendation letter and eventually purchase a solution the vendor pays us. You save countless hours, get a solution that truly fits your needs and your vendor earns a new customer. Everyone is happy.
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Tip: There are sites that help you search for solutions BUT they do not tailor recommendations to your needs. The vendors that pay the highest ad dollars are the ones you see first. Cleerly serves up the top matches for your needs. It’s a much better model. Try it out now and see.
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