To run a successful business is like catch-22. Retail store owners must juggle different tasks like inventory, sales, marketing, and management effectively. They can delegate the tasks to the right people and unburden themselves of the load. However, the pressure of making decisions still hound them every single day. At the same time, spreading themselves too thin on their business will cost them their health and ineffectiveness.
If you are a retail business owner, then you need to find a way to maintain your productivity despite the demanding nature of your industry. To help you get some relief while still performing under pressure, below are tools that will help you deliver results for your business while keeping focused at work.
#1. Retail Zipline
One of the most difficult things about managing a retail business is keeping track of all your programs that aim to engage with your customers and grow your sales. This fact is true if you have lots of stores in different locations. You cannot afford micro-managing the development and execution of each program since you have other equally important things to worry about.
Retail Zipline helps streamline store communications so you can stay updated and keep everyone in the loop regarding your programs. You can contain all messages and emails within the tool, so nothing gets past you or your employees.
Also, Retail Zipline provides your real-time data to the performances of each store and allows you to gather actionable insights presented in an easy-to-understand manner. The reporting helps you spot weaknesses that you need to improve on and strengths to emphasize in your business.
Lastly, you can access the tool from your mobile devices so you can stay on top of things whenever or wherever you are. This feature is crucial for retail managers and owners who are always traveling but need updates to the performances of each store.
#2. Time Doctor
For online retailers, you need to take a different approach when it comes to managing your employees. You probably won’t be working together in the same room and most of them, if not all, will be working remotely. Despite this setup, you still need to track their performance based on the time spent working on your projects.At the same time, you need to be accountable for your performance as well so you can measure how wisely you use your time for your business.
A tool like Time Doctor will help track the time that you and your employees spend at work. It is a powerful tool that takes screenshots of users and monitors their chat activity, so you have better insights on how effective they are at work. Time Doctor also includes a payroll module and payment integrations so you can seamlessly generate the reports and send the payments with just a click of a button.
#3. Slack
While online chat is considered as a time suck, it’s not always the case especially when you want to collaborate with your team in real-time. Messenger apps such as Whatsapp, Viber, and others are sufficient enough apps that help mediate communication, but they don’t offer productivity features that are crucial in fostering a work-conducive chat environment.
While Slack is similar to any other messaging apps, it lets you organize employees in different channels teams based on the team they’re in so you can communicate your ideas more effectively. More importantly, Slack can integrate with an extensive list of third-party apps so you can conduct actual work from within the tool. Drag and drop files from Google Drive or Dropbox to Slack so you can work on the file together with your team without exchanging emails and waitng in vain for their response.
#4. GoCo.io
Growing your business will require you to hire more employees. At the same time, your employees should get the benefits and the payment they deserve from your retail business. As your team grows, so are your responsibilities in keeping people happy and satisfied with their jobs and profit from their hard work.
From the reasoning above, you need to take up more work if you want to take your business to the next level. However, you can use a tool like GoCo.io to do the heavy lifting for you and increase your productivity. This HR tool helps you streamline the hiring process so you can filter out the best people for the job and onboard them to your business as efficient as possible.
You can choose from the largest selection of insurance carriers online to provide for your employees. Each carrier has a dedicated advisor to help answer your questions and concerns. You can also compare each insurance to see which one fits you the best and enroll online without the paperwork. If you have an existing insurance provider, GoCo.io will help you integrate it within the tool with a few clicks
#5. Shipstation
One of the biggest pain points of online retail businesses is the importing, managing, and shipping of customer orders. If you have zero experience in managing e-commerce order fulfillment, then expect to mess up your client orders and frustrate them enough not to make them order from you again.
To prevent this from happening, you need to shape up your fulfillment services before it’s too late. If your current process isn’t efficient enough, use Shipstation instead to not only keep your customers satisfied with on-time deliveries, but also make it easier for you to keep track of orders. The tool lets you create workflows based on different filters so you can automate the ordering process. By setting up the workflows, you can worry about other things in your business as the tool will automatically carry out the orders for you.
Finally, you can get an overview of your inventory and orders so you can keep track of everything in your retail business. Aside from monitoring the package order, you can determine which products are selling like pancakes and which stores are performing the best.
Conclusion
Retail owners like yourself already have yours hands full with your business. While your intent is to grow your stores and remain profitable over time, it doesn’t make sense for you to carry all the responsibility especially when there are productivity tools featured above for use. Instead of wearing yourself out worrying about all facets of your retail business, the tools will help you focus on your priorities while you keep everything
