Running a BigCommerce B2B eCommerce business comes with its challenges, especially when it comes to managing inventory and stock. This daunting task can include keeping track of multiple product variants, managing complex pricing structures, and ensuring accurate inventory visibility across sales channels.
However, with the right strategies and tools in place, you can streamline your stock management processes, minimize overselling, and ultimately enhance your customer experience.
In this post, we will explore practical solutions to help you overcome common B2B stock challenges on BigCommerce, empowering you to optimize your operations and drive business growth.
BigCommerce B2B eCommerce Stock Challenges
Poor Systems for Managing Products and Deliveries
Keeping the right number of products in stock is one of the biggest problems for B2B online stores.
Online stores often sell many different products, so it’s hard to keep track of how many they have left in real-time. Having too many products ties up money and costs more to store, while not having enough can disappoint customers, delay orders, and lose sales.
B2B orders are usually larger, have different product types, and need to be sent to multiple places, making it challenging to have the right product levels.
Coordinating the delivery of orders is also difficult. Since orders come from various customers and go to different locations, getting them delivered on time and at a good cost can be tricky.
Tracking shipments and handling returns makes the delivery process even more complicated, as it requires more time, people, and resources.
Back orders
When you run out of stock on a popular product, being able to take backorders is crucial for keeping customers happy and sales flowing. However, managing backorders on BigCommerce presents several major challenges:
- Lack of automation
You can’t automatically flip a product’s status to accept backorders when inventory runs out. Nor can you easily restore regular status when stock is replenished. Everything has to be done manually.
- Poor visibility
There’s no way to track which orders are normal purchases versus backorders. You also can’t view real-time backorder inventory to plan for incoming stock.
- Disconnected processes
Backorders get lumped in with regular orders, with no ability to manage them as a distinct workflow. This makes it tough to prioritize, track, and communicate realistic delivery estimates.
- Inventory chaos
Without full backorder functionality, precisely planning inventory levels for products accepting backorders is extremely difficult. You risk over-ordering or under-ordering.
- Guesswork delivery dates
Since you can’t manage backorders cohesively, providing accurate expected shipment dates for backorder customers is nearly impossible. This creates confusion and frustration.
The lack of native, robust backorder capabilities in BigCommerce turns a standard eCommerce situation into a labor-intensive, error-prone process. Dealing with backorders starts to feel like a house of cards that could collapse at any moment.
How to Solve Your BigCommerce B2B eCommerce Stock Challenges
Use One System to Manage Inventory Across All Sales Channels
Using one system to manage your inventory across all the places you sell can help you accurately track how many products you have. This allows you to monitor stock levels to fulfill orders efficiently.
Good inventory management is one of the most important parts of an online sales system. Accurate data about inventory levels is key for efficient operations, and this is where integrating your inventory system with your online sales system is useful.
Your inventory system can help you handle essential tasks like tracking:
- How many products do you currently have in stock
- Past order histories
- Customer details
- Products that are currently being shipped
Integrating your inventory and online sales systems allows you to share data about stock levels between the two systems. You can also automatically transfer data like new orders and shipping details from your online store to your inventory system.
Seamlessly sharing data between your major business systems helps you better understand what products to sell and where.
As a best practice, everyone involved in your business should be able to easily access your inventory data so they can make smart decisions.
Automated Inventory Management
BigCommerce BackOrder helps you handle low inventory BigCommerce B2B eCommerce situations smoothly for better sales.
The app automatically updates your product pages, cart, and checkout to show accurate inventory levels. This way, customers know right away if an item is low in stock or backordered.
Customers will get notified immediately when a product is going out of stock or backordered so they can plan and order more inventory. Moreover, BackOrder supports all types of products and integrates seamlessly with any BigCommerce theme or template.
Performance Analytics & Reports
BackOrder provides real-time analytics that gives you an in-depth look into every aspect of your inventory levels. You can get transparent, comprehensive reports on sales performance, stock status, and more. Export data to CSV for custom analytics.
Any inventory updates from your existing management system or ERP will automatically sync with BackOrder and BigCommerce. You can easily assign and edit product settings for backorders and stock levels one by one, in bulk, or via CSV upload – whatever works best.
With BackOrder’s advanced analytics and reporting, you will gain complete visibility into your inventory. Use the insights to optimize stock levels, streamline backorder handling, and drive more sales of your top-performing products.
Solution To Stock Outs
The native BigCommerce pre-order feature and manually updating product details with “back ordered” messages are confusing for customers and staff. Meanwhile, creating a waitlist registration sounds good, but many customers won’t bother – they’ll likely just buy the product elsewhere when it’s back in stock.
In addition, hiring a developer or agency to build custom backorder functionality is extremely expensive and time-consuming before you see any return on that investment.
Therefore, instead of those clunky workarounds, BackOrder provides an all-in-one app solution tailored specifically for efficient backorder and inventory management in successful BigCommerce stores.
To Conclude
Effective inventory and stock management is crucial for the success of any BigCommerce B2B eCommerce business. By implementing the right strategies and leveraging powerful tools like BackOrder, you can overcome common challenges such as inaccurate inventory tracking, inefficient logistics coordination, and poor backorder handling.
With BackOrder, you gain complete visibility into your inventory levels, automate product updates across your sales channels, and streamline your backorder management process. Our advanced reporting and analytics capabilities provide valuable insights to empower you to make data-driven decisions and optimize your operations for maximum efficiency and profitability.
Contact us to learn more about how BackOrder can transform your BigCommerce B2B eCommerce store!
