The big benefits of a wholesale ordering system

Around 2 in 5 Australian businesses have experienced supply chain disruptions this year, with 28% of these reporting major delays and significant impacts on revenue. This puts more pressure on the already logistically complex role of suppliers with increased delays in deliveries, inflated transport and delivery costs, and even potential material shortages. Between the need to meet customer expectations in a changeable and tricky market, to delivering within slim timeframes, wholesalers have an even bigger challenge on their hands when managing their orders.  

So don’t let manual, time-intensive and error-prone processes for receiving, tracking, and fulfilling orders cost your business more unnecessary hours, resources and money. This clearly won’t cut it if you want to remain competitive in the marketplace. However, implementing a simple yet powerful wholesale ordering system can help you level up your processes and reduce downtime by automating administrative tasks. 

Think greater efficiency, more streamlined operations and complete visibility - from locating and selecting stock to the products arriving at their destination. An effective wholesale ordering system can complete the laborious activities of a typical order management process, in a fraction of the time. Below, we outline the main business benefits of a modern ordering system:  

Quick online ordering

You can make the online ordering process infinitely simpler and painless by eliminating the inefficiencies of manual tracking. With automated wholesale ordering systems and apps, your business can have full oversight of orders in real-time, all the way through to the orders being delivered. Plus, you can easily monitor how outstanding orders are progressing and analyse order history about previous or completed orders if needed - from anywhere, at any time.

Easy cost management

Businesses often have little to no visibility when tracking costs vs profit. A smart software solution can dramatically reduce inaccuracies, reduce admin time and give you full visibility of performance. 

Getting efficient access to your data highlights the areas where you can improve margins and reduce costs. This can be achieved by having software that feeds into your accounting system giving you access to critical financial information. This can further help you identify peaks and troughs in demand, helping your company be more data-driven and able to effectively conduct financial forecasting across your entire business.

Accurate inventory management

It’s hard to distribute products if you don’t have a complete view of your inventory. By investing in a sophisticated order management system, you’ll always know what stock you have and where. This process can be simplified by integrating data and product details into the wholesale ordering system to manage stock more effectively and all within the one platform. This way you can automatically and accurately manage stock and sales data; helping you reduce warehouse kilometres for your pickers and manage your stock volumes.

Complete visibility of deliveries

Having full confidence that your orders will be delivered in full and on-time (DIFOT) is important for wholesalers. With real-time visibility of your fleet, you can optimise routes based on multiple factors to give you control of your business, speed up the dispatch to your customer and boost profitability. Modern software within supplier ordering systems can also let your customers track deliveries, sign proof of deliveries (PODs) and track their credits from their own phones.

Ditch the supply-demand gap

With the advent of businesses going digital, some have failed to live up to the supply levels promised, leading to disgruntled customers and lost business. That’s why you need an appropriate method of overseeing and managing supply, so you don’t lose out to competitors! Bridging the gaps between supply and demand in order to meet market needs has traditionally been a challenging balancing act for wholesalers. But it doesn’t have to be anymore. With the right order management system, you can have full confidence that the correct amount of products are available at the time they’re needed. This helps you keep your customers happy and in turn, more likely to remain loyal. Plus, with a well-built system that has features you can implement as you need them, you can be sure you’re onboarding a tech stack that’s scalable and future-focused, rather than just a quick fix that might only address the challenges of today and create problems down the track. 

Is your business ready to make a move and better manage the order process from end-to-end? Whether you're distributing 10 to 10,000 orders a month, a streamlined wholesale ordering system allows your business to execute more orders in a quicker timeframe and improve the entire customer experience in the process.

To learn more about how you can ensure the ongoing growth and success of your business via the right systems, download our Supplier of the Future Guide.