Solutions

SOLUTIONS

 

With over 30 years of experience, TCRDS specializes in offering solutions for businesses in the multichannel retail industry. The primary way in which we solve the problems faced by these businesses is through our flagship product, MOST®, which stands for Multichannel Order System Technology.

As a multichannel business, you have a lot to contend with. With orders coming at you from multiple sources, it can be exceedingly difficult to manage them on a piece-by-piece basis. These complexities are only compounded when you add in maintaining a centralized inventory, consistent customer service protocols, shipping standards, and the like.

In order to ameliorate these problems, multichannel retail businesses often turn to multichannel order management software. However, not all of those systems are created equally. MOST® of them, in fact, are a one-size-fits-all product. While these systems can certainly assist with some of the problems facing a multichannel retail business, their lack of flexibility and scalability can be an issue. This often leads to retailers adjusting their businesses in order to accommodate the system that they’ve put in place.

Our multichannel order management software is different. MOST® is a completely scalable, flexible and extendible program, which is built out of individual modules that can be customized to directly address your business’ particular issues and needs. MOST® isn’t just a flexible system, though; it is a powerful suite of tools that have been designed to the highest standards by our team of skilled software engineers. More than that, even, our skilled software engineers work directly with our clients to make MOST® accommodate their businesses. You don’t integrate with MOST®; MOST® integrates with you.
If you’re a multichannel retail business looking for a solution to your order management issues, here are the ways in which MOST® can not only meet your needs and solve your problems, but also improve your brand image and profitability.

 

 ORDER MANAGEMENT

 

Without a doubt, this is the primary area where multichannel retail businesses need assistance. With MOST®, you’ll be able to streamline your order management from multiple channels into one easy-to-use portal. This gives you greater control over your business and saves valuable time by sparing you the hassle of handling your orders in a fractured way. MOST® is built to support the following ecommerce platforms and websites:

 

• CommerceV3
• MarketLive
• Webbasix
• eBay
• Amazon
• Buy.com / Rakuten.com
• Other 3rd party ecommerce systems

 

MOST® doesn’t just specialize in handling ecommerce, though. It is the perfect multichannel order management solution for brick and mortar retailers, catalog retailers and mail order retailers. No matter where your orders are coming from, we’ve got you covered. With our powerful multichannel order management software, order entry is a breeze. Your customer service representatives can use our platform to field orders over the phone or through the mail. Because everything is centralized through our system, your inventory and shipping information is updated on the fly, giving you a minute-by-minute view over the performance of your business.
If you’re a multichannel business, you might not be operating under one unified brand identity or company name. MOST® is equipped to handle this, and it can be entirely customized to accommodate these different brand and company names. While to the outside world you’ll still be able to appear as multiple companies, on the backend all of your orders, sales and transactions will be processed as one.

 

PAYMENT

 

You’re not running your business for the sake of your own health. You want to earn money and be paid for the products that you provide to customers. Payment can be especially difficult to coordinate and keep track of if you’re offering your products through multiple channels. How can you maintain payment standards across multiple channels? How can you establish business rules for payment across multiple channels? With MOST®’s powerful order management software, you’ll be able to do this easily.
MOST®, as you might expect, is capable of handling payment through all of the avenues that you need: major credit cards, electronic check, Bill Me Later and PayPal. In addition, with MOST®’s customizability, you’ll be able to craft custom business rules for handling payments. With everything in one place, you won’t have to go through the hassle of bending the functionality of multiple ecommerce platforms to meet your payment needs. MOST® takes care of that for you.
There are, of course, other benefits that you can derive by using MOST®’s powerful multichannel order management system. You can set up your system to automatically load your customer’s previous payment method. This may seem like a small thing, but lowering the barriers that your customers need to cross in order to make a sale dramatically increases the likelihood that you’ll convert sales. In addition, your customers will be able to use multiple forms of payment to complete their order, a functionality that is especially useful if you’re a business that deals in high-priced items.
As ecommerce has expanded, so too has the interest of federal and state governments in it. One challenge that has recently cropped up for multichannel retailers is that states are increasingly moving to enforce their sales taxes on purchases that customers make through online retailers. MOST® comes equipped to handle the sales taxes of different regions for which you and your customers are liable.

 

PROMOTIONS

 

With your business spread across multiple channels, it can be difficult to offer discounts and other promotions to your customers. However, once MOST® has been integrated with your systems, offering promotions to your customers is a breeze. Our order management software is capable of handling promotions on both the order and item level.
Say, for example, you want to offer first-time customers of your business a discount on their first order. Our system handles that effortlessly. In addition, you can issue coupon codes to your customers that can be used across all of your various retail streams.
That’s not all. One of the things that make ecommerce platforms an exciting way to sell your products is the way in which you can automate upselling and cross-selling. Our system allows you to specify items that can be offered in addition to a particular item that a customer may be interested in. Further, you can also set up free items to be included with certain orders, a functionality that will encourage your customers to buy once they have placed your products in their online shopping cart.
We offer a variety of ways for you to set up promotions that encourage your customers to buy. In order to narrow down the kinds of promotions that you’re offering, you can choose to offer them along the following lines:

 

• Discount percentage
• Coupons and coupon codes
• Source code
• Merchandise types
• Catalog codes
• Group or family
• Quantity
• Merchandise Amount
• Channel
• Date range
• Purchased items
• Catalog Pages

 

With this kind of functionality, you’ll be able to offer attractive promotions and discounts to your customers, while also being able to narrow those promotions down to the specific customers you hope to attract and retain.

 

INVENTORY MANAGEMENT

 

With orders coming at you from multiple directions, keeping a firm handle on the status of your inventory can be exceptionally difficult. Thankfully, MOST® offers a powerful system for managing your business’ inventory. Best of all, it has the functionality and customizability that you need to truly stay on top of everything.
In order to keep a firm grasp on your inventory, we offer a robust categorization system. Not only does this allow you to keep an eye on what’s selling and what isn’t, it also allows you to quickly and accurately assess how your stock is set and performing across different categories. MOST® allows you to classify and report your inventory using the following fields and classifications:

 

• Country of origin
• MAP handling
• State or country restrictions
• Brand
• Class
• Subclass
• Category
• Department
• Merchandise Type
• Style
• Weight and measurement
• Picture ranking
• Fashion ranking
• Tech notes
• Keywords
• Comments
• Family
• Customer minimum
• Family minimum
• Oversize
• Hazardous
• Convert to drop ship
• Remote Stores On Hand Levels
• Net Sales
• Gross Demand
• Month Supply
• Reorder Point
• Proprietary
• and more

 

That’s not all. As part of MOST®’s capabilities with regard to customization and extensibility, we also allow you to categorize everything in your inventory with up to nine user-defined fields. If, for example, you’re a multichannel retailer dealing in books, this means that you’ll be able to classify your inventory according to ISBN, description, author, title, etc. Because our system is so robust, you won’t have to rely upon gerrymandering whatever ecommerce platforms you’re already using to suit your specific needs. In addition, our system tracks how many items you have:

 

• On hand
• In transit
• Received
• Due In
• Allocated
• Back Ordered
• Private Reserved Stock

 

With this, you get the complete picture of the status of your inventory. You will be able to tell not only where it is at the moment, but where it’s been and where it’s going.
With your entire inventory constantly tracked and maintained through one portal, you will be able to attain valuable control over your business. One of the ways in which you can leverage all of your inventory information is by setting up inventory alerts. With these you track your items by percentage of sales or quantity, and the system will alert you if you’re in danger of running out of any particular item. This greatly reduces the risk of overselling and losing the faith of your customers as a result.

 

EMAIL

 

As you’re working across multiple channels, one of the primary ways that you stay in front of your customers is through email. That’s why MOST® offers a robust automated email system for keeping in touch with your customers. Our automated email system can handle:

 

 

• Custom alerts on your pre-defined business rules
• Automatic order confirmations
• Back orders
• Ship confirmation and tracking
• Discontinued items
• Returns
• Credit card declines
• Suggested or Substituted Items

 

Because all of your customer information is centralized in one place, you can sort through your email list to offer segmented email blasts and promotions. With our system, you’ll be able to stay in touch with your customers on an as-needed basis, something that will improve your reputability and your customers’ faith in your business and brand.
In addition to this, we also offer the functionality to rent and exchange customer names in house without third party intervention. This means that you can work with other businesses to share qualified leads for developing and expanding your existing customer base. This is an easy and powerful way to boost profits, and a door that is typically closed to multichannel businesses if they do not have a multichannel order management software system in place.

 

CUSTOMER SERVICE

 

As a multichannel retailer, providing comprehensive and expedient customer service can be difficult. Your representatives need to be able to track up to the second the order cycle of any order. When your sales are fragmented across multiple platforms, tracking down this information can be time consuming. Every second spent by your customer service representatives tracking down a customer’s question regarding their order is a modicum of that customer’s faith in your business that has been eroded. With MOST®, your customer service representatives will be armed with the tools they need to search for your customers and their orders by whatever information they can provide. This includes:

 

• Email address
• Credit card
• Phone number
• Amazon order number
• eBay order number
• PayPal order number
• Company
• Name
• Phonetic similarities in name or street
• Zip code
• Customer PO
• Invoice number
• Gift card / Gift Certificate / E-Gift Card
• Customer service action logs

 

Part of the benefit of moving all of your customers into one easy-to-use order management software, is that you can centralize the way that your customer service representatives deal with your customers. That’s why our system allows your reps to leave unlimited comments in the order management software both at the order and customer level. This ensures that every representative who touches your customers is fully apprised of their specific needs, wants and past history with your company.

 

SHIPPING AND RECEIVING

 

In a multichannel business, you have items that need to be shipped out based upon orders placed through multiple ecommerce platforms. On a small scale, this can be difficult to manage, but as your business grows this can become alMOST® impossible. With MOST®, you get a powerful shipping module that is capable of streamlining your order fulfillment and shipping needs across multiple retail channels. On the warehouse level, you’ll be able to monitor in real-time the status of all of your orders as they are:

 

• Dropped
• Pulled
• Picked / Packed
• Manifested
• Returned

 

As this is ongoing, automated complex business rules can be applied to manipulate cost efficiencies for minimum dollar release amounts, ship complete, ship remaining complete type holds.
MOST® comes with approved manifest software for all major shippers, including:

 

• USPS (United States Postal Service)
• UPS (United Parcel Service)
• FEDEX (Federal Express)
• Integrated Systems Associates
• ADSI (Advanced Distribution Solutions Inc)

 

Because of this, you’ll be able to accurately track the shipping and fulfillment of all of your business’ orders. When you pair the functionality of our shipping module with our powerful automated email system, you’ll also be able to keep your customers apprised of their orders on an up-to-the-minute basis. As you probably know already, this isn’t just a value-added functionality; this is something that people expect from online merchants.
One aspect of shipping that perhaps doesn’t receive as much focus as it should is cost. Depending on the shipping providers that you’re working with, shipping can become an expense for your business and your customers. With our shipping module, you’ll be able to do real-time rate shopping and customize to meets your needs, to ensure they are always as cost-effective as they can be. This allows you to keep your prices down, and it puts you in a position to offer competitive shipping rates and promotions to your customers.

 

SALES TRACKING AND DETAILED ANALYTICS

 

One of the true benefits of conducting business online is being able to leverage large amounts of data about your sales and customers to better refine your business practices and offerings. However, when your business operates across multiple channels, this data is very hard to access in a way that is useful to your business. Sure, you can spend the time personally aggregating it from your multiple retail streams, but every minute you spend doing that is a minute taken away from other aspects of your business.
Because MOST® aggregates all of this information for you, you’ll have immediate on-the-fly access to your business’ metrics across a wide variety of channels and retail streams. With all of this information at your fingertips, you’ll be able to watch your business for certain trends, pitfalls and strengths. Armed with this information, you’ll be able to leverage MOST®’s other functionalities to make quick and profitable adjustments to the way that you’re conducting business. Needless to say, this is a great, efficient way to boost your business productivity and profitability. It’s only made more powerful, though, by the way in which MOST® can help you boost your SEO marketing strategy. We offer 20 powerful tools for evaluating your content’s SEO performance, information that you can use to get your products and your retail channels out in front of customers more frequently, leading to more sales.

 

CONTACT US TO LEARN MORE

 

In order to learn more about how the MOST® multichannel order management system can help your business, please contact one of our representatives. They’ll be happy to talk to you about how MOST®’s functionality can be used to streamline your existing order system. In addition, TCRDS also offers solutions for hosting, cloud and dedicated servers, credit card processing and off-site backup. If your multichannel retail business needs assistance in any of these areas, we’d be happy to help as well.

 

Please contact our office for more information.

 

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Products

Our flagship sales order management application MOST® is designed specifically for catalog, retail, ecommerce and business to business merchants

 

 

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