Nurturing a Profitable Relationship with Retailers
It’s the most important relationship your business has. It’s also an incredibly important relationship for your retailers. When everything goes well, everybody wins.
You already know the advantages retailers get out of working with you as a Drop Ship Vendor (DSV).
It feels like you’re carrying the load. And to a large degree, that’s true. But, as you’re aware, there’s a great deal of benefit associated with this relationship. Nurturing it can be very good for your long-term business survival and growth.
It’s important to remember that retailers can opt to have as many suppliers as they desire and they don’t have to limit themselves to only one brand. It’s also important to note that poor-performing suppliers cost retailers billions of dollars each year. If you want to be a valued supplier to a retailer, it’s important to make this relationship work for both of you.
So what’s needed to nurture a relationship with retailers?
Well, the first way is to be compliant with a retailer’s business processes. This includes processing a retailer’s orders, complying with all of the necessary transactions, PO pricing, packaging, labeling, shipping documentation, and accurate inventory feeds. This compliance makes you valuable to a retailer by reducing its expenses surrounding order issues and rework.
The second way is to have the ability to scale your business upward, delivering more on-time orders each day. This provides the retailer with the ability to increase sales capacity – especially if you can process orders 24×7. Once again, this makes you valuable to a retailer while also increasing your revenue from that retailer. However, to do this without also increasing your operating costs, you need real-time order processing that manages it without human involvement, 24×7.
And lastly, to support all of this, you must maximize your warehouse’s efficiency. To do this requires installing the analytics and tools needed to dramatically increase the number of shipments that can be made each day and their accuracy.
The bottom line is that OPAL addresses all of this for you and more. It combines all of your order processing and warehouse management activities into one AUTONOMOUS software platform – NO Warehouse Management System, NO Shipping Software, NO Retailer Portals, and NO EDI companies or documentation charges.