An online store powered by a capable online inventory system like DataQlick can be easier to manage than a retail store, offering you more flexibility and saving you the significant upfront costs that renting or buying store space, decorating it, hiring employees, and storing items entails. Proper inventory management for small business makes an online-based shop a viable alternative to the brick-and-mortar retail shop in many markets. Here are the major benefits of selling your products and services online.
Lower Costs
Setting up and running an online shop is cheaper than opening a retail storefront, which comes with many costs that an online shop doesn’t have, including rent, utility bills, maintenance costs, and repair costs. An online shop’s website design, hosting, and customer support costs are small by comparison. What’s more, an online shop doesn’t need as many employees.
Larger Customer Base
An online shop doesn’t restrict your customer base to the area where the shop is located, but enables you to sell your products nation-wide, even world-wide. The vast customer base available online can fuel the growth of your shop at a much faster pace, as well as offer you opportunities to tap into new markets. At the same time, however, online competition can be though.
Regardless of your market or niche, chances are there is at least one other established online shop offering products similar to your own. A QuickBooks inventory app such as DataQlicks offers you the inventory control features you need to understand inventory performance and focus on those items that sell the best, to keep up with larger competitors.
Simplified Inventory Management
With an online shop, you don’t have to store your inventory in the backroom of your retail shop or in a warehouse. In fact, you may not even have to store it at all, if your supplier ships the items customers order on your website straight to their address. But what truly simplifies inventory management for an online shop is an online inventory system such as DataQlick, whose easy Inventory Manager View and Advanced Inventory Management Controls help you maintain adequate stock levels throughout the year and identify and sell products that can turn into overstock before they tie up your capital. Find out more about DataQlick.