The growth stage of the product life cycle is when your product hits the road and takes on the acceleration. Once you launch your product, you need to spread awareness, establish your brand in the market, increase market share, improve sales and increase revenue. In the growth stage, you are likely to increase sales of your products and improve your margins.
Well, manually doing all the labor may slow down your process and cut your profits. To avoid this, Process automation is critical in the growth stage of the product life cycle.
Here are the essential keys to automation in the growth stage:
Automate product data sharing to enable scale
The proper marketing and content make your product stand out in the market, whether physically available on the shelf or sold online.
Consumer these days require details about the product to make their buying decision. They need details like color, dimension, ingredients, ratings, and reviews. Consumers are aware and hands-on to ample information and compare your product with others. It is equally important to provide transparency.
Similarly, your retailer needs a structured plan to allocate and sell products. They also require details like pricing, stock available, shipping documents, charges, and other information. As you do not have only one retailer, it is crucial to compile your product details and submit them in various forms to your retailers.
If you are habituated to storing your data on a spreadsheet and keep updating the list now and then as per your suppliers’ requirements- the process gets error-prone, monotonous, and frustrating.
Thankfully, you can automate the entire process with the help of product data automation. With business automation solutions like HubBroker’s, your details and data will be automatically updated, formatted into a proper structure, and delivered to all your retailers and suppliers. Using automation, you’ll be eliminating the risk of human error, back and forth emails, and notifying retail buyers now and then.
Keep your partners updated with inventory
Everything you do is related to buying and selling the product. And in the growth stage, you have frequent inventory coming in and going out. Hence, you will need to provide regular updates to your traders and retail customers. It would be best to have visibility and transparency at all levels, especially the third-party warehouse.
This is much needed if you fill orders directly to your customers, i.e., dropshipping. You need to provide hourly or daily inventory updates for a smooth flow.
Using an automated process, your inventory data sharing would become extremely easy to send and receive inventory updates. It eliminates managing inventory through emails, phone calls, or other portal updates.
Automate order management
We all want our business to grow and expand. Your business is booming in the growth stage, meaning you receive multiple orders from various channels. You might get orders from e-commerce, big-box retailers, or another marketplace. Managing orders from multiple channels and the process are time-consuming.
As well as getting orders electronically, your retail purchasers might expect you to acknowledge orders electronically within 12 to 24 hours. Different retailers might require an affirmation within 30 minutes! Orders can show up whenever, here and there, requiring an action, even in the middle of the night.Automating order management helps in tackling this problem.
Overseeing and managing orders through spreadsheets, emails aren’t versatile for a developing business. When you are at the growth stage of the product life cycle, you really want an automated system to manage inventory and orders across all business channels.
HubBroker makes your management work easy and accelerates an eCommerce, Omnichannel, or marketplace initiative. No matter which eCommerce platform, EDI, or ERP you are using, HubBroker helps you deliver everything faster to your customers. Contact us today for more.
