Amrita Angappa
It has never been an easy task. Yes, we are talking about running a wholesale business. When you are a rookie in the wholesale industry, you have plenty of factors to catch up. From taxation to keeping up with the highly competitive marketing strategies, you have a lot of responsibilities to hold on.
The wholesale industry is growing at a rate of $8 billion.
With the wholesale industry booming, you need to keep learning and relearning the business strategies to avoid making blunders.
Let’s take a look at the common wholesale industry challenges:
Since majority of the buyers find themselves active 24/7, customer service should be tip-top. Every customer should be able to communicate by enabling online help desks and chatbots. Many B2C companies have been using Chatbots lately. You can handle many crucial information such as shipping dates, size charts and refund policies through a chatbot. You can also forward complex questions to different live agents and helpdesk email.
Many retail partners can now enable chatbots to communicate with their peers. SAP also uses chatbots to coordinate with its wholesale partners with the aid of analytics to understand new trends.
Do you know that Instagram consists of wholesalers? While new sales channels get updated every month, you need to keep in track of them to target your customer. Every small business has to have proper knowledge regarding this. When you think about your customers, you should not forget that they also would be thinking about their customers. Balancing both the requirements through different sales channels becomes a challenge without implementing industry 4.0 tactics.
Inventory management has become more complex. While B2B customers have started exploring immediate shipping options, you need to respond to various customer demands and on how warehouse operates. This would mean that businesses would have to restructure their operations in physical and workflow layout.
You may also need to focus on the competition.
The biggest challenge for businesses would be to increase the customer demands while they would prefer to be treated how a B2C buyer is treated. This would mean faster turnaround times and expedited shipping options. You need to have the best partnering options meant for running different warehouses, direct shipping, or while working with all 3PLs to understand the need to grow.
While you add newer product lines, expand yourself into niche markets and fill higher orders, your warehouse team would have to perform more work. Scaling is going to occupy more space in your warehouse. In this case, keeping up with different orders would be an ordeal.
While people look forward to grow their margins, wholesalers should turn their major threats such as dropshipping into different channels. Disintermediation is nothing but the reduction of intermediary uses between different people making something as well as the end-customer using it. With lack of coordination, this becomes a tough challenge.
How do manufacturing businesses tackle it? Click here to know.
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