Streamline your Wholesale Reorder Process: Key Trends to Follow
The way that a brand selling wholesale designs and implements their reorder process is key to retaining retailers. A well designed reorder process reduces a retailer's friction and can help ensure continuous sales. And with the current market, it’s becoming more important than ever to focus not just on new customer acquisition, but also retention.
Manual retention solutions aren't scalable, which is why a carefully selected software to help you drive reorders for your wholesale business can be a game changer. Large enterprise solutions, like Order Management Solutions (OMSs) or Enterprise Resource Planning (ERPs) software, already offer an assortment of retention features. However, while enterprise solutions cater to larger companies, smaller brands need efficient, scalable solutions to compete and serve a large segment of their customers. And while leveraging marketplaces like Amazon can provide streamlined features, they come at a huge cost that many businesses can’t sustain.
In the coming years, advancements in reorder automation, data-driven insights, and AI-powered forecasting will become table stakes for brands selling to independent retailers, whether you are a large or a small brand. If brands don’t leverage these technologies, they may find themselves falling behind the curve–and giving up an unnecessary share of their profits.
Read on to learn more about some of the trends you need to stay on top of to modernize your wholesale retention business:
Automated Reordering Systems
Current Landscape: Automations are transforming the reordering process. This can already be seen for larger enterprises. For example, think brands selling to Walmart that are leveraging Electronic Data Interchanges (EDIs), which facilitate automated digital fulfillment. However, smaller brands often need access to these same capabilities using cost-effective, simplified solutions. After all, even small brands might have hundreds of accounts that they need to service, or have demanding retailers (like Walmart) taking time from their independent channels.
Future outlook: While enterprise platforms like Salesforce or Order Management Systems (OMS) like OrderEase offer advanced tools, smaller brands can also leverage predictive technologies (like Vanik) to improve reorder accuracy without the overhead of large-scale systems. In this future state, brands selling to independent retail can automate the wholesale reorder process in a way that was previously only accessible to larger brands with complicated systems.
Even smaller retailers are starting to expect this! After all, today, millennials are involved in 73% of B2B transactions, and are beginning to expect a ‘DTC-like’ experience for their wholesale channels. If your ordering process is outdated, retailers may feel the same way about your brand.
The Rise of Self-Service
Current Landscape: Big players like Fluent Commerce offer extensive automation platforms for enterprises, but it’s almost impossible to self-service these implementations without large teams and budgets. Not to mention the large cost to maintain these systems post-implementation.
Future outlook: Keep an eye out for solutions tailored to independent retail. For example, Vanik is designed to be self-serve, allowing you to onboard retailers into an automated reorder flow by yourself. The trend is moving away from ‘all-in-one’ platforms, which include inventory and shipping management, and more towards owning a simplified process with a few tools that are easy to maintain. For example, a DTC brand of the past may have leveraged a complicated custom Ecommerce site hosted on wordpress, but today leverage Shopify with multiple apps that serve unique, streamlined purposes. A brand selling on Shopify likely has an app for email marketing, one for shipping and another for loyalty as an example. The trend of very specialized tools and apps designed to help a brand with a very specific purpose is beginning emerging for wholesale as well.
Integration of Real-Time Data Analytics for Reorder Optimization
Current state: Tools like NetSuite and SAP Integrated Business Planning offer comprehensive data analytics for large-scale businesses. This allows brands to make better informed decisions, prompting reorders at the ‘right time, place, and price’. This has been the name of the game for over a decade, but access to these analytics comes at a large cost. And even with a large team, enterprises still struggle to maintain processes efficiently and often spend more than they expect on implementing and acting on these insights. Brands are increasingly interested in ‘SAP-like’ features which dominate the upper end of the market but don’t exist for SMBs.
Future outlook: Solutions will arise that simplify the integration of real-time data analytics, providing brands selling to independent retailers all the data they need to drive retailer retention without complicated integrations, systems or databases to maintain. This will help small brands become more competitive and data-driven without adding complexity or cost. For example, rather than integrating a CRM, OMS, and a custom B2B Ecommerce store, Vanik can sit alongside your existing wholesale platform to drive retention.
Owning Retail Relationships Directly
Current state: Brands of all sizes outsource their retail relationships to marketplaces and distributors. This model can be convenient, but comes with many downsides. These solutions can take 25% or more of your sales, and give you less control over your returns, how your product is handled, and the data you have access to. Worst of all, you have no relationship with the retailers purchasing your products, making them a churn risk to your competitors.
Future outlook: Brands are moving towards owning their relationships out the gate. As a result of this, they will seek out solutions in which they can interface with retailers directly, without needing to rely on third party marketplaces and distributors as heavily. This increased control will allow them to grow their margins and build a sustainable business for the long-haul.
Streamlined Wholesale Onboarding
Current state: Brands of all sizes have a suboptimal wholesale onboarding process. They may use outdated website formats, or simply give up their new customers to marketplaces like Faire. And retail intake forms are complicated, or don’t provide the information needed to adequately vet retailers. Perhaps worst of all, they require significant manual effort on the brand’s part to implement.
Future Outlook: Brands will need to bring their wholesale registration processes into the digital age, and own the relationship from the outset. Ideally, retailers should be able to get in touch with you directly, understand your brand’s value proposition, and be able to see real case studies from your customers right on your site. Without these updates, your brand will quickly seem dated and uninteresting to retailers. And as many brands are well familiar with, speed matters–if you wait 24-48 hours you may potentially miss out on a sales opportunity.
B2B E-Commerce Moving Towards Reordering Loyalty Models
Current State: Larger companies are increasingly offering reordering loyalty models, but the infrastructure to support these models is often complex and costly. While loyalty has taken off for DTC brands, this type of solution was previously unavailable for wholesalers without significant customization. And this is a problem given that brands of all sizes are moving more towards the wholesale channel.
Future Outlook: Brands selling through wholesale channels will move towards making reorders more accessible for their customers and then customizing loyalty plans to each individual retailer, rather than simply offering a ‘wholesale discount’. They will want solutions that don’t require heavy customization or investment and will look for tools to help them capture reliable revenue and long-term retailer relationships. This should include a dynamic reordering cadence and wholesale-specific incentives, like improved payment terms or gifts for the buyer representative.
Conclusion
The future is bringing powerful advancements in reorder technology, but while enterprise solutions focus on large-scale operations, Vanik is designed to help smaller brands streamline reorders, improve efficiency, and compete with the giants.
The tide is turning–if you aren’t adopting the latest best practices, like automated reordering and real-time data-driven insights, you are leaving value on the table for your competitors.
If you are interested in learning more about how Vanik can help you grow your retail business by owning your retail customer relationship, set up time to chat with us.
