Your food wholesale business wastes time. You’re spending too much time communicating with buyers. Endless calls and emails, trying to coordinate delivery times, purchase amounts, etc., have no place in the wholesale food supply world.
The food supply business is all about time. Profit margins are razor thin and people expect quick delivery times. You can’t succeed unless you can efficiently fulfil orders. Streamlining your ordering process leads to wholesale food success.
Buyers won’t browse endless PDF pages of products. They want an easy way to place standing orders. Likewise, your business shouldn’t deal with meticulous ordering processes. Taking inventory shouldn’t cause problems.
Adopting modern e-commerce technology is the key to streamlining your wholesale ordering. Think about Amazon’s ordering process. The e-commerce giants make ordering simple. Just one click buys products.
While you don’t need one-click ordering, you should strive to make ordering as easy as possible. The fewer barriers to entry, the more products grocery stores and restaurants will order.
So today, we want to help you understand how wholesalers food supplies and distributors can improve their ordering process. Let’s get started.
Why Streamlining Matters for Food Wholesalers
Business-to-business transactions have a history of, shall we say, taking their time. That sentiment doesn’t work in the grocery world. Buyers are also sellers. Stores are at the whims of their consumers. People will shop elsewhere if their favourite grocery store doesn’t have enough inventory.
In one study 70 per cent of e-commerce buyers perceived a positive impact on order accuracy, on-time delivery, inventory visibility, and time to process orders. An e-commerce platform ticks those four boxes.
A Streamlined E-commerce Platform
E-commerce isn’t just for Etsy stores and Amazon. Wholesaler food supplies need consumer-friendly platforms. There’s not much difference between selling groceries and selling earrings.
For example, your store needs a search function. Popular keywords should return your products. This helps consumers navigate your website. Accurate search is a must in today’s Google-powered world.
Further, you need to make it easy for consumers to place one-time orders and also reoccurring orders. Wholesale orders often repeat. Choose an ordering platform that allows for scheduled, reoccurring orders.
Better Inventory Management
You can’t streamline your ordering without inventory management. You need to know how much product you’re both buying and selling. But, not every inventory management system works well with e-commerce. You won’t succeed by manually editing your inventory.
Instead, you need to update your inventory in real-time. Let’s paint a picture. Say a consumer buys something. They want 1000 units. Those 1000 units leave the warehouse and get deducted from your inventory.
After you order another 1000 units, those units get scanned when they arrive in the warehouse. An e-commerce backend can log the fluctuating unit volume as units arrive and leave the warehouse.
Better inventory tracking gives both employees and customers a realistic sense of available product. Grocers need to know what products they can immediately order.
Transparency and Delivery Scheduling
As we mentioned above, consumers demand transparency in their e-commerce. They want to know about the products available, how many products are available, and when those products are available.
A streamlined ordering platform allows consumers access to your inventory. They can skip the phone calls and emails asking about product availability, long-term product availability, etc.
What’s more, streamlined platforms allow for efficient delivery scheduling. Both your business and your consumers will know when something ships and arrives.
Shipping transparency tells grocery stores and restaurants when they can expect their deliveries. Stores that know when products will arrive can plan sales, inventory, etc.
Order Processing Times
Processing orders takes time. Grocery stores and restaurants like to call your warehouses to coordinate both delivery locations and times. The logistics of mass-ordering often takes person-to-person communication.
However, streamlined online platforms remove the human element. Real-time product tracking combined with scheduled ordering and easy-to-use “added instructions” negate the need for humans.
The best online ordering platforms rely on human-to-computer interaction.
Finding the Best Platform For Your Needs
Food wholesalers need online ordering platforms. The platforms streamline your transparency, ordering, shipping, inventory management, and more. Though the platforms’ biggest benefit is their benefit to both consumers and your wholesale business.
Nobody wants to spend time emailing tiny details. You don’t want to deal with daily calls asking about product availability. Likewise, the grocery store doesn’t want to call your warehouse. Time is money, and there’s never enough time.
A streamlined ordering platform means organising the grocery delivery process and also saving money. But not every platform works well for every business. In fact, not every platform offers a tangible amount of streamlining.
You need more than an online storefront. Your wholesale business needs an online platform that’s made for grocery sellers.
Enter Seedling Commerce
At Seedling Commerce, we built our platform from the ground up to help your wholesale food business succeed. We strive to ensure that you’re using an efficient, transparent ordering process.
Our platform handles everything from stock to prices and ordering to delivery scheduling. We help food wholesalers track products from arrival to departure.
We make ordering easier for consumers. Easier ordering makes for more sales and higher consumer satisfaction. Happy consumers are consumers that spend more money.
So if you’re ready to take your wholesale food business into the 21st century, get in contact with us. Our team would love to help you choose the best platform for your specific needs.
We strive to make sure your online ordering makes life easy. After all, work should be fun. The less time you spend on coordinating orders, the more time you can spend growing your business.
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