Retail

Strategies Stores Are Using to Stay Ahead

The latest sales data indicates that online sales are continuing to grow, while the pace of in-store sales is slowing down for many retailers.

Big box stores are adopting different strategies to deal with this shift in the way consumers shop, but there is no question they are taking this trend seriously.

Target announced recently that its fourth quarter online sales grew by 30% in 2016, while its store sales dropped by 6.1% year over year, prompting Target to cut its prices at the expense of profits. They are also planning to make better use of stores as fulfillment centers, and equipping all sales associates with mobile point of sale devices. The concept behind this strategy is that shoppers will think of Target as a great place to shop with great prices.

The brand Tommy Hilfiger who in the past derived sales not only from their own stores, but also from high street giant Macy’s, chose a different route. Tommy Hilfiger’s in store sales were lackluster and Macy’s is planning to close many of its stores, further contributing to the brand’s decline. Deciding to modernize the brand, Tommy Hilfiger looked to social media to bring the brand to the attention of younger audiences, and then debuted its latest collection with a fashion show in Venice Beach, California – an unusual move for a brand that would typically show its products in New York. The results were astonishing, with a surge in sales online in the 24 hours following the show, and 50% of traffic from first time visitors.

In line the with these stores, Kohl’s has also seen growth in its online sales and a decline in its in store sales. To counter this, they are reducing the size of their stores from around 88,000 square feet to something smaller, and reducing inventory by 3% across all stores for the next three years.

Whether it’s a price change, a new way of marketing your brand, or re-evaluating the use of the square footage in your bricks and mortar store, the pace of change in today’s retail industry requires continual assessment to keep the attention of today’s consumers.

Small and medium sized retailers also have to be innovative looking to more control of inventory, switching from in-store to online sales, using physical space not only as a store but also as a fulfillment center, and using technology to bring it all together – and who said retail was easy!

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Drag and Drop Supplier Mapping Tools for Your Online Store

xocbox has just introduced its new mapping tools to take the headache out of updating products and prices in your online store.

Whether you are a busy online store owner or a store designer uploading products to your client’s store to meet a deadline, the latest mapping tools from xocbox will free up your time, and keep you ahead of the game!

We now offer advanced drag and drop mapping tools designed to make your life easier – one for inventory feed mapping, and one for mapping supplier data for all your products, including new products, and price updates, together with product variations, GTINs, and SKUs.

So if you are tired of manually uploading and editing products from all your suppliers, or want to add more lines before the online shopping season begins in earnest, contact us today and learn more about our mapping tools.

If that still sounds like too much work, we also offer a low-cost full service solution that really does take the pain out of managing updates to your products – as we take care of the work!

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GTIN Requirements for Google Changing May 2016

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As most retailers probably know, in an attempt to improve the user’s experience online,  Google is expanding the requirements for GTINs in May 2016.  This should help people understand more clearly the product being sold.

If you sell new, manufactured products online and don’t have the correct information associated with your products via a GTIN, you should probably check the Google requirements. If the data is incorrect, this will impact your ability to sell with Google ads and affects thousands of online sellers.

Warnings started being sent to online merchants in February advising them to update their product data if the GTIN was missing or incorrect.

After May 16, 2016 merchants will begin to receive item-level disapprovals and will need to meet Google’s requirements in order to continue serving ads for products.

May 16, 2016 is the deadline, so if you haven’t considered your UPC’s and the new Google requirements yet, visit Google’s support center for more information.

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Supply Chain for Small to Medium Sized Business

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Supply chain is again one of the hot topics and is predicted to be one of the biggest areas of investment in technology for retailers during 2016.

In fact, the scramble to get ahead by retailers can be seen in the recruitment of new faces to manage the supply chain operation in companies such as Target and Wayfair.

Target announced that they had hired Amazon veteran Arthur Valdez as executive VP and Chief Supply Chain and Logistics officer, while home furnishings etailer, Wayfair LLC, hired Staples veteran, Sharif Sleiman, to lead its supply chain operations (Sleiman has also held managerial positions at Groupon, eBay and Oracle).

At the last ProMat Supply Chain Management show the focus was on supply chain management software, with an emphasis on systems integration, and the ability to fulfill increasingly complex orders.

Many businesses (including some large companies) still rely heavily on manual processes, and according to a report from Supply Chain Insights, managing procurement and supplier relations is still one of the most time consuming tasks they undertake.

Why is supply chain so important to the retailing giants, and how can small and midsized companies compete?

Software integration is integral to an organization’s success. If all the processes required to carry out your business don’t “talk to each other” then a person will have to step in to connect everything together.

A growing number of smaller businesses is now realizing that the investment in technology to solve these problems can greatly improve existing processes, and save valuable time and dollars.

xocbox can help

xocbox offers semi-customized automation solutions for small to mid-sized businesses and has provided EDI solutions to allow communication with suppliers and the electronic placing of website orders for fulfillment, inventory management, and can provide integration with third party products.

A recent project working for a small manufacturer of custom products, allowed orders to be placed via multiple ecommerce platforms and processed through the xocbox management system, and a work-order was then produced from the system to be passed on to the shop floor to make the product.

Previously the work orders had been generated manually, and as the products usually involved more than one trade to complete, had to be generated multiple times by hand. This new process has saved many hours of administrative time, and reduced errors (and frustration).

If you are considering automating a process in your business and are not sure where to begin, contact xocbox to discuss how we may help.

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Stop Displaying Out of Stock Items in Your Yahoo Store

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If there is one thing that is driving shoppers crazy it is displaying products in your store that you don’t have available. Whether it says, Sold Out, Not in Stock or Out of Stock – they don’t want to see it.

If you display a product on your Category or Section page, and the shopper clicks through to the item description only to find it’s not available, they will soon move on to another website for a more satisfying shopping experience.

Even if you show products on your Category and Section pages as Out of Stock, or Sold Out, it soon looks as though you don’t have anything that is available. We all know how hard it is to keep up with updating your website with fast moving, in demand products at the holidays, but to a shopper it might even look as though you are going out of business!

xocbox has the answer for Yahoo merchants who don’t have the time or resources to keep up with the time consuming process of marking products in and out of stock. With xocbox, once your item count goes to zero, the product changes to not orderable in your Yahoo catalog manager.

No manual changes for each item!

Contact xocbox to learn more about this feature.

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Keep the ecommerce Platform – Change the Backend

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Recently we have been talking to several ecommerce merchants who have been considering switching their online store to a platform that offers more services, and is less expensive.

The big question they ask is, “how difficult would that be?”.

The simple answer is that migrating products to a new platform is something that can be done.
 
However, changing platforms is not something that should be taken lightly. Most people considering this have had their store for several years or longer, and it is easy to believe that by changing your platform you will receive immediate benefit, that is, sell more products.

Selling more products is definitely not guaranteed, and if you don’t pay special attention to the many details involved (such as, SEO, marketing, 301 redirects to name just a few), you could find yourself selling less.

If you are a mid to large-scale online retailer, you have probably found that as your business has expanded, so too has the complexity of managing all your backend functions.

Many of the functions that are needed to keep your products up to date, and to track orders often evolve into manual processes that take an extraordinary amount of time for you and your staff.

xocbox can work with you to take a look at your store backend processes and find solutions to problems that are taking you away from spending time with your customers.

We specialize in working with Yahoo merchants, and Woocommerce stores, but can offer advice on all types of integration problems regardless of the ecommerce platform.

Please call us for a free consultation at 858-752-3803, or contact us via our Contact Form.

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