These days, sellers conduct business through a number of channels both offline and online. These can include a cash register at a brick-and-mortar location, a selling platform (or store) like Magento or Shopify, a custom website with a shopping cart extension like WooCommerce, on marketplaces like Amazon and eBay, and even a point of sale tool like Square.
So when it comes to accurately inputting all that sales data into inventory, shipping, and accounting systems, life for multichannel sellers gets very complicated very quickly.
And the complexity is multiplied tenfold not if but when human involvement introduces errors. Typically, when sales hit a peak or the business scales in some way, either the repetitive manual entry becomes too much for a busy seller or hiring an accountant becomes too expensive to justify. In fact, the data management has been the undoing of many a burgeoning business.
Either way, sellers are conflicted: The ones who handle their own bookkeeping know their time is better spent growing the business with marketing, networking, lower-cost vendors — the list goes on. And those who pay to outsource data entry and bookkeeping are often left wondering if they’ll ever be free of an expense that scales in tandem with their business.
Great news. There is a better way. By automating your ecommerce data, it’s possible to save as much as 94% of your bookkeeping costs. That’s money you could invest back in the business and time you could spend focused on what you love to do, which, for most, is not data entry.
At a minimum, if you process 1,000 orders per month and pay a bookkeeper $20 per hour on data entry at a rate of approximately 5 minutes per order, your monthly bookkeeping costs would be $1,667 or $20,000 annually.
And if you enter your own data, you’d spend at least 83 hours per month creating spreadsheets and manually typing or copy-pasting order information to and from multiple business systems and processes, which includes creating a sales receipt, confirming product availability, updating inventory, recording customer information, and managing shipping.
Numbers don’t quite work for you? Plug in your own and see how it shakes out.
When it comes to time wasted, money spent, and errors avoided, the solution is simpler than you think. Automating ecommerce data can make all the costs, headaches, and errors go away for good.
With the right solution, you can move a single accurate set of sales data throughout your accounting and business systems with the click of a button. You can also sync and track revenue, orders, and expenses without introducing costly human error.
Numbers aside, life’s too short to spend it running after your data. Automation can fix just about anything that’s ailing an ecommerce business. After all, properly aggregated, accurate data can help you find insights on what’s selling, who’s buying, where, and why.
With the perspective automation and analytics provide, you stand a far better chance of both succeeding in ecommerce and enjoying the journey.