As the busy season approaches, many companies are starting to feel the stress of the busy season year crunch. This stress can result in mistakes that can be crippling during this frantic time of year, which is why it's important to take steps to avoid any mishaps. You want to avoid mistakes, such as errors that occurred due to manual placement of an order or last-minute sourcing of promotional stock of a popular item from a supplier, as these issues can be an exceptionally difficult to resolve at this time of the year.

One way to deal with these issues is by implementing an online company store. Here are some of the ways an online company store can benefit your business.

The Benefits of An Online Company Store

We've discussed in the past how there are numerous benefits to incorporating an online company store, such as automating processes, controlling inventory and creating a more cohesive identity. However, today we'll be focusing on brand management, reporting and streamlining processes.

Most companies invest huge sums into creating a cohesive image for their organisation. This brand image is used across all media or products to deliver a consistent, singular message to an audience, regardless of whether that audience includes your customers or people within your own organisation.

If you want to deliver your brand's message to your customers across a variety of promotional products, whether you’re talking about brochures, banners or water bottles, an online store can help ensure that message is consistent. The company store will ensure all promotional products are of a certain standard, whether we're taking into account the manufacturing quality of the product, its design or the message it is trying to communicate. The online company store also adds an additional element of convenience since all approved promotional products are available in a single location.

All online stores today have a variety of analytics tools that allow you to track vast amounts of buyer and inventory data. This data can include your most and least popular items, the times of the year a certain product sells or sits in your inventory, the availability of stock, and where a product is going. Regardless of the type of data, an online store can help gather all of this information so that it can be used to create reports, such as usage, item, sales and custom reports, for your business. The information captured in these reports can be used to better inform the way you spend your promotional marketing budget in the future.

Streamlining processes, regardless of whether they are of direct benefit to the customer, is something that all companies can benefit from. However, a cost-effective online company store may currently only make sense for larger companies due to the high costs involved. Thankfully, as the technology develops, the cost of running a dedicated online company store will decrease, making it possible for smaller businesses to take advantage of this technology.

Companies can make expensive mistakes that could have been easily avoided if they had implemented an online company store. It's these costly mistakes that force many organisations to rethink their views on online company stores. As the busy season creeps closer, you should take a look at our latest infographic, Horror stories no marketer ever wants to experience, to see some of the other difficult issues people have dealt with, or contact one of our expert consultants for more information.