Gone are those days when a retail business was only limited to brick-and-mortar stores!
Now, more and more people shop online from the comfort of their homes, and retail owners need to explore the online shopping space. In fact, half of US consumers start their holiday shopping through online stores, and 25% of them shop online at least once a month!
These retail numbers say a lot about what works for the modern economy and what it will be like in the future. This presents a massive opportunity for retailers to reach a wider range of customers and increase their overall revenue.
However, online retail takes a different approach to conducting business. You need the best tech stack to compete in the ever-growing and saturating online space.
We’re here with a list of nine high performing online tools you can add to your tech stack. These tools will help you stay ahead in the game and take your business to the next level!
Top online tools you need to run a successful retail business in 2022
Building a retail store—both offline and online—takes a lot of effort! There’s work going on on multiple fronts—inventory management, point of sale, marketing, CRM, customer support, etc—you need an extra hand to take some burden off you.
The tools we’ll recommend will be that extra hand and ease down processes for you. We’ve added one tool that fits in each of the above mentioned categories of operations in a retail business.
1. LightSpeed: inventory management software
Inventory management controls how things move through your store and ensures that there are always enough items available for customers to buy. Managing inventory can be challenging and tiresome, especially when done manually.
Lightspeed facilitates the process of inventory management by making it fast and convenient. From adding products to creating multiple variants and monitoring the stock levels, tracking SKUs across multiple locations has never been easier!
Moreover, it’s simple to use, economical and streamlines your entire inventory—online and in-store.
To find out more you can read this article by Lightspeed.
2. Carto: business intelligence tool
Running a retail business requires a great deal of decision making and tactical reasoning along the way. The good news is that business intelligence solutions exist to assist you with analyzing trends and getting insights from your data. More importantly, they help you make tactical and strategic business decisions by presenting mountains of data in a consumable format.
Carto is a cpg business intelligence tool prominently used in the CPG and retail sectors. It brings together data, analysis, and visualization to simplify complex analysis for optimizing supply chain networks.
For instance, if you’re looking to expand your business in a particular region, Carto can help you decide the optimal locations to set up your store. It will enrich the current store and distribution center locations and integrate and analyze it with third-party data. It’ll then visualize the data to help you make the decision faster!
3. Shopify: point of sale software
Point of Sale (POS) software manages business-related information, including your sales, inventory, cash, customer accounts, and more. It is one of the biggest potential time savers for your retail shop. It facilitates the management of refunds, shop credits, and returns.
Additionally, you can run loyalty incentive programs, analyze customer data, automate your bookkeeping system, and send automated purchase orders to suppliers.
Choose your POS carefully because switching your POS system can be a complicated and expensive procedure.
Shopify POS is the perfect option for retailers who sell both online and offline. It helps you manage both online and offline store inventories and see hundreds of reports, including everything you need to understand the back office.
The best part? You get all the resources you need to market and sell your goods on different platforms from one location.
Validate your concepts for performance during the design stage with AI-generated attention analytics
4. Quickbooks: retail accounting software
Retailers manage several accounting tasks regularly—managing inventory, sales taxes, payroll, invoices, and more. Their stores can be very profitable when handled well, but you need accounting software to provide you with the necessary tools you need to accomplish the job.
Quickbooks is a cloud based accounting software that helps you send estimates, produce invoices, manage bills, run reports, take online payments, track your income and expenses, and more.
Moreover, it auto updates the inventory management when a new product is purchased or sold, helps you track your sales, and provides consolidated financial data.
5. Hubspot: CRM software
Many store owners see CRM software as a blessing! Why?
Because the best CRM software helps find new customers, uncover potential market opportunities, and lay the groundwork for future customer-related communications via phone, email, and trade shows. That’s literally everything a business owner ever desires, right?
Moreover, they also assist in facilitating customer loyalty programs and identifying potential new business prospects.
Hubspot is an intuitive and automatic CRM that takes care of the tiniest details of your business and manages your pipelines effectively. Its super convenient and easy to use UI ensures that you never miss a deal and keep a close eye on them.
It’s known for its easy setup and efficient data organization!
6. Google analytics: analytics tool
For any business with an online store, it’s essential to know how customers interact with their website—the time they’re spending, the products they’re checking out, the source of the visitors, and more.
Google Analytics is a helpful tool for keeping track of a variety of indicators about the functionality, user behavior, and profitability of your website.
For any business with an online store, it’s essential to know how customers interact with their website—the time they’re spending, the products they’re checking out, the source of the visitors, and more.
Google Analytics is a helpful tool for keeping track of a variety of indicators about the functionality, user behavior, and profitability of your website.
Retailers want to market to their audience, and Google Analytics helps analyze data such as revenue, demographics (gender and age of the possible target), website traffic, and visitors’ behavior. With this data, you can create new tactics that will help you continue to increase revenue.
With metrics like the number of users, sessions, average session duration, entrances, exit rates, bounce rates, etc., imagine how much you can improvise your processes with these analytics.
7. Attention Insight: design testing analytics
Ever wondered if you could go back in time and change one thing about your campaign so it doesn’t tank?
Well, time travel may seem unrealistic, but what if we could know how customers would react to a product without even launching it?
Tools like Attention Insight help you validate your concepts and product in the design stage itself, without even launching! With its AI generated attention analytics, you can know how impactful a landing page, advertisement, or packaging is with 90-94% accuracy.
8. Zendesk: customer service platform
It’s crucial to support your customers during their buying journey with you. After all, they’re the ones that drive your business, and their feedback would bring in more customers. The good news is that you don’t have to do it all manually—there are customer support platforms that can assist you with that!
Zendesk is a popular customer service cum eCommerce platform that lets you access all your support tickets—social media, emails, and chats—in one place. You can manage customer data and assets with its native Sunshine CRM, provide personalized experiences with consumer behavior analysis, and keep track of customer interactions.
It includes chatbots and AI-powered interactive messaging tools and allows you to create your apps and base workplace decisions on comprehensive consumer data.
9. Canva: visual content creation
Visual content plays a significant role in how your brand is perceived by its customers and prospects. Design tools like Canva make it easier to create seamless visuals in no time, with thousands of templates to spark your creativity.
The easy drag and drop functionality simplifies the design process for you, so you can focus on what you’re good at—creating and running ROI driven campaigns!
While the free version is sufficient for beginners and new businesses to start designing, the pro version provides you with unmatchable features—access to premium tools, templates, and functionalities.
Be it logo creation, designing social media posts, branded images, brochures, posters, landing pages, infographics, business cards, or whatever you can think of— Canva does it all!
Plus 10. Canva: visual communication
Visme is an all-in-one platform for creating presentations, documents, data visualizations, videos, and other branded content. This platform helps you create from simple branded visuals to fully interactive content to keep your audience captivated.
It also lets you easily store, organize and search the assets and designs for your team’s projects. It has a drag-and-drop editor and thousands of templates to customize with your brand colors. No matter your role or level of design skills Visme makes work life easier. It has a collection of native integrations so you can connect Visme to other tools you already use. Combining simplicity with flexibility Visme allows you to create engaging visual content.
Plus 11. Colorcinch: photo editing tools
Stunning photos should come along with your blog and social media posts and all your marketing efforts. This is where Colorcinch comes in handy.
Colorcinch is an intuitive photo editor that lets you edit your photos (crop, resize, change background), enhance them, and make their colors pop. You can add watermarks, texts, creative overlays, and AI-powered filters and effects to your images and make them uniquely yours. With Colorcinch, creating branded graphics can be done with just a few clicks.
Plus 12. Yooz – E-invoicing & P2P automation
Yooz presents an accounts payable automation platform employing AI and deep learning, simplifying the entire invoice processing workflow. This secure cloud-based solution offers effortless setup, allowing seamless automation of the end-to-end purchase-to-pay (P2P) process.
Businesses can significantly slash cycle times to a few hours, leading to an impressive 80% cost reduction. Moreover, the platform requires no specialized training, enabling users to initiate operations within an hour. Experience the benefits firsthand with a complimentary 15-day trial before considering an upgrade to the Gold version. Reach out to their team for further information.
In a nutshell
Though online tools have been around for a long time, in recent times, they have become more mainstream. This is because online tools are no longer a ‘good to have’ resource, as in the pre-covid era. Today, they’re a ‘must have’ for all retail businesses—small or large!
With these tools, retailers find effective ways to market their products and keep up with their online sales while outshining their competition!
What is one online tool that has helped your retail business tremendously, one that you swear by?
