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How to Keep Track of Both of Your Shops without Going Nuts
Nowadays, a retail shop that doesn’t have an online version is losing money; that is as much a part of life as breathing. That is why you can be sure that everybody that wants to succeed in business has one. You are likely a smart individual and have one too, but you sometimes wonder if it’s worth all the trouble. After all, an online store has the same amount of problems as a real store has, plus a handful of its own brand of trouble, and it takes a lot of time for you to manage all of it.
Well, there are ways you can handle both channels of sales without having to clone yourself; all thanks to some new tools of the trade you will be interested in hearing about.
Synchronize Your Sales
If you have a store, you are familiar with what a point of sale is. To you, it is the cash register, where you ring up your customers and they pay for the goods. On the online store, it would be the shopping cart. They work in wildly different ways, and so you manage them in different ways. That’s the first thing you need to change. In a time when every device is connected on a cloud on a daily schedule, there is no reason for you to have to do double the work by managing the two separately. You can use a point of sale program that allows you to treat online purchases, and the physical store’s purchases, as one. It will also let you control the stock, billing and accounting for both stores. This way, your online store will be an extension of the rest of the business, and you will have a better control of it on a global level.
Two Shops, One Site
Because you are already using the same program to keep track of, and manage, your sales online, and in real life, there is no reason for you to not take advantage of this situation. Use your online shop to promote your physical store, as well, so your customers can choose their preferred shopping venue. Since you are keeping track of your stock and sales together, you don’t need to worry about running out of products, mixing up sales, or duplicated purchases, or billing. Don’t be afraid to mix up the two mediums. If you can manage your website, both as an online shop, and as blog and promotional site for your real life store, you will be saving a lot of time in front of the computer that can be used in different and more profitable ways, like selling things.
To summarize, the best way for you to not let your two shops drive you mad is to not think about them as two different shops. They are not. Think of them together as one business. If you look at the situation this way, and approach the job with tools that allow you to treat it as such, you will see that instead of having twice the work, you have half of it, with double the results.
