Canada (English)
Colombia
Caribbean and Puerto Rico
Ecuador
India
Indonesia
Ireland
Malaysia
Mexico
Panama
Peru
Philippines
Singapore
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Sri Lanka
Thailand
United Kingdom
United States
Optimize Inventory, Reduce Costs, and Delight Your Customers
Global commerce has changed dramatically. It is easy for merchants to sell direct, and the internet enables customers to source from low-cost overseas competitors. Retailers and eCommerce businesses must be agile and built on modern technologies to manage their supply chains and customer relationships effectively.
Customers demand omnichannel options to purchase, receive, return, and exchange products anywhere—in-store, online, over the phone, or at kiosks. Online self-service and value-added services offer merchants opportunities to differentiate from competitors while improving their bottom lines.
There are few great ERP options available for growing eCommerce companies. Entry-level systems are affordable but lack advanced features for inventory management. Smaller retailers struggle to manage complex business systems with multiple bolt-on applications for point-of-sale and online sales, order fulfillment, and shipping. Legacy ERP systems offer robust features but lack the mobility and open architecture today’s online merchants need to connect with customers and suppliers.
This eBook explores how Acumatica’s Retail Edition helps omnichannel merchants boost sales, reduce costs, and exceed customer expectations by harnessing modern technology to grow in today’s competitive digital economy.
Increase Sales
Generate Leads and Sell More with Embedded CRM, Connected Commerce, Point-of-Sale, and Post-Sale Service
Every merchant operates on razor-thin margins, and competition is fiercer today than ever before. Retailers, wholesalers, and manufacturers must capitalize on every business opportunity and explore new ways to increase revenue from new and existing customers. Acumatica Retail Edition helps companies generate more leads with connected sales automation. Sell more with connected commerce and point-of-sale, and differentiate with innovative service offerings using embedded service management capabilities.
“Now that we have a CRM, we are creating an outbound sales division and doing account management, which was hard to do before because we had no central resource for data.”
Marketing and Sales Force Automation
Segment marketing lists for outbound email marketing campaigns. Build landing pages and manage inbound marketing with connected social media, blogging, and other modern lead generation strategies. Configure lead generation rules and customize sales processes to improve conversion rates.
Connected Commerce Storefronts
Expand sales with connected eCommerce storefronts to highlight your product lines to online customers. Acumatica connects to BigCommerce, Shopify, Magento, and other leading commerce storefronts. Synchronize images, customer pricing, categories, inventory availability, and additional information from Acumatica to your storefront. Fulfill B2B and B2C orders inside Acumatica with full transparency of order details to online customers.
Native Point-of-Sale Application
Capture in-store sales transactions with a connected point-of-sale application. Acumatica connects easily with point-of-sale hardware, including cash registers, receipt printers, barcode scanners, credit card terminals, and other devices. Enable customers to order anywhere and pickup anywhere, process returns in-store, and manage exchanges through your back-office application for an authentic omnichannel customer experience.
Applications for Service and Support
Complete the buyers’ lifecycle by offering post-sale support for products or services with embedded CRM and a powerful, self-service customer portal. Service Management empowers field technicians with schedules, equipment details, inventory levels, service history, and equipment warranties anytime, anywhere, on any device.
Exceed Customer Expectations
Improve Customer Service and Satisfaction with Faster and More Accurate Orders Plus Online Self-Service
Competition to attract and retain customers is at an all-time high. With disintermediation and the growth in internet commerce, customers have more options than ever before. It is not enough to meet customer needs. Sellers must exceed customer expectations to grow in today’s digital economy. More than 8,000 organizations rely on Acumatica to provide an exceptional customer experience through automation, embedded CRM, self-service applications, and other advanced features.
“Now everything is downloaded automatically and tracking numbers get uploaded every hour, which allows customers to stay informed about their order as it happens.”
Accurate, Real-Time Information
Manage your entire business on a single platform with connected, accurate, real-time data to make better decisions on behalf of your customers.
Acumatica automates the quote to cash cycle from the opportunity to order fulfillment with embedded CRM, flexible order management, and automated warehouse transactions. Streamline purchasing with inventory replenishment, vendor bidding, and configurable approvals workflows. Leverage advanced capabilities for sales commissions, customer-specific pricing, returns and exchanges, inventory allocations, and matrix items.
Simplify accounting with a full suite of financial applications to track daily operations and generate financial statements. Also, Acumatica provides tools for reporting, analysis, budgeting, and planning. Native applications are available for payroll, time and expense management, and service management.
Competitive and Flexible Pricing
Automation enables distributors to cut costs resulting in more competitive pricing. Extend your competitive advantage with flexible customer pricing, discounts, and promotions.
World-Class Customer Service
Amaze customers with exceptional service through embedded CRM with support cases and online self-service. Automated fulfillment with WMS provides faster and more accurate order fulfillment. Order history and web storefront connectivity make it easy for customer service to capture new orders faster.
Digitally Transform Order Processes
Streamline order processes with will-call orders and electronic signatures for quotes and orders. Manage omnichannel sales, returns, and exchanges in-store, online, or through the back-office ERP application.
Optimize Inventory
Manage Supply Chains Effectively with Replenishment to Increase Turns and Minimize Carrying Costs
Effective inventory management is paramount for every seller. Stock too much inventory, and you experience product obsolescence and high carrying costs. Carry too little inventory, and you face stockouts, lost sales, and customer discontent. Merchants require flexible tools to manage inventory replenishment and optimize stocking levels for maximum return on investment.
Optimize Inventory with Replenishment
Leverage safety stock, minimum and maximum stocking levels, demand formulas, and other advanced settings to automate inventory replenishment. Analyze inventory turns to determine the precise settings for each item to maximize profits and reduce carrying costs. Identify fast-moving items to optimize warehouse locations for stocking in-store shelves and picking, packing, and shipping customer orders.
Minimize Perishable Inventory Issues
Minimize write-offs for perishable and obsolescent inventory with physical inventory stock rotations based on lot expiration date and first-expired-first-out (FEFO) picking. Identify lots close to their expiration date for quality checks before shipping to avoid write-offs and allowances. Manage product recalls with cradle-to-grave lot and serial number tracking.
Monitor Supply and Demand in Real-Time
Create custom dashboards, email and text alerts, and real-time reports to monitor supply and demand in real time. See supply problems in real time as orders flow through the system from your online storefront, in-store sales, or back-office sales order entry system. Respond to low-stock and stockout situations with connected procurement and real-time notifications to customers and suppliers.
Streamline Item Management
Automate purchase order requisitions with online vendor bidding for added items. Simplify product family creation, management, and ordering with variant items. Create matrix items quickly using attributes such as color, style, grade, or size. Use item substitutions to suggest alternatives to customers, including cross-sell and up-sell opportunities.
Streamline Warehouse Operations
Automate Transactions with Barcoding, Wave and Batch Picking, and Advanced Inventory and WMS Features
Best-in-class sellers understand how to turn inventory and fulfill orders fast. Efficient warehouse operations are built on technology for barcoded transactions and flexible order fulfillment strategies.
Acumatica’s Warehouse Management (WMS) application and advanced wave and batch picking enable distributors to fill orders faster with less staff. Automate the pick, pack, and ship process while reducing errors, improving data accuracy, and eliminating manual data entry.
“Acumatica tracks inventory in the right categories for us and provides for drill down to see the specifics on what’s behind the number. Acumatica is already doing more than our last system could, giving us a competitive edge.”
Embedded WMS with Barcoding
Reduce errors and improve customer satisfaction with accurate and fast order fulfillment through barcoding and automated inventory transactions. Acumatica offers a powerful WMS application and barcode printing to automate picking, packing, shipping, physical inventory counts, warehouse transfers, and put-away transactions. WMS runs on popular mobile devices, including smartphones, ruggedized scanners, and tablets.
Increase productivity with defaults to minimize data entry for preferred locations. Capture lot and serial numbers for every transaction quickly with barcodes. Complete the fulfillment process with integration to scales and carrier shipping systems, including small parcel carriers or LTL and truckload providers.
Flexible Order Fulfillment
Merchants need configurable order fulfillment options. Create special order drop-shipments from vendors direct to your customers. Reserve inventory for customer orders with notifications when back-ordered products are received. Pick more orders with less effort with advanced wave and batch picking. Optimize your warehouse with user-defined locations, including aisle, rack, shelf, and bin locations with ABC Codes to prioritize stocking locations for fast and slow-moving items.
Extended Warehouse Applications
Implement connected applications for advanced warehouse management with electronic data interchange (EDI) and additional transportation and logistics options.
Automate Business Processes
Harness the Power of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning with Visual Process Workflows
Technology is a strategic investment for retailers. It enables merchants to process orders faster through templates, access to customer order history, matrix item tables, connected point-of-sale devices and web storefronts, and automated barcoded transactions. Modern technologies, including artificial intelligence with machine learning, provide additional benefits to improve selling processes. Companies require tools to configure business processes. Complex processes need more control, while simpler processes should be fast and flexible.
“Now, a person can walk into my office and say we could really streamline things if I can do X, and I say, ‘Okay, we can do that!’ With the previous solution we were really stuck in time.”
Automate with Artificial Intelligence
Smaller merchants have limited accounting resources. Artificial intelligence with machine learning enables them to process vendor payments faster with less effort. Vendor invoices received by email are identified, mapped, and converted to AP vouchers by the embedded AP automation process in Acumatica. Machine learning adapts and improves the operation with minimal human interaction.
Advanced Expense Management with Automated Bank Feeds provides additional benefits through artificial intelligence. Scheduled bank feeds and other financial transactions are downloaded and imported directly to Acumatica for processing. Artificial intelligence identifies and categorizes expenses automatically, reducing time spent by accounting staff to reconcile expense receipts and reports.
Configurable Business Process Workflows
Every commercial business is unique, and there are many different workflows across the company. Some orders start with sales quotes, while others are captured with minimal effort from online commerce storefronts and POS devices. An order may include a few items that are easily picked, packed, and shipped in a single transaction. Conversely, larger orders may be picked in waves, packed into multiple boxes, and shipped via different carriers to various locations.
Visual process workflows enable merchants to tailor the ERP application to how they best serve their customers. Define detailed workflows to control complex processes and streamline workflows for simpler transactions.
Improve Data Visibility
Connected Applications and Open APIs Bring Data Together in Real Time with Powerful Dashboards and Analytics
Data silos are common among companies using entry-level accounting applications or legacy ERP systems with limited, native functionality. Stand-alone CRM data is not available for analysis with sales orders in the ERP application. Online orders from disconnected storefronts create delays in information as orders are imported manually into the back-office system for processing and order fulfillment. One-off integrations burden IT departments with unnecessary infrastructure costs and labor for application maintenance and support.
Acumatica provides everything progressive merchants need to manage every part of their business from a single platform with low-code and no-code integration tools to consolidate real-time data from external systems.
“Acumatica has allowed us to be a better digital business. From sales to operations, from admin to C-level executives, Acumatica allows us to have insight into data to make good decisions to grow our business in a powerful way.”
Robust, Feature-Rich Software
Third-party bolt-on applications provide minimal integration with entry-level accounting and legacy ERP applications. Modern commerce ERP systems such as Acumatica provide more functionality out-of-the-box. They alleviate the need for costly, one-off integrations. All the data is connected in real time.
Easily Connect External Data Sources
Each retail and eCommerce business is unique. Harmonize enterprise data across specialized applications with open APIs for low-code or no-code integration. Add certified marketplace applications to round out your business system, bringing all data into Acumatica in real time for a single version of the truth.
Configurable, Role-Based Dashboards
Monitor every part of your business in real time with configurable, role-based dashboards, and drill down to transaction details. Set up email and text alerts to stay on top of late orders, stockout scenarios, and other supply chain issues. Monitor performance and establish metrics for every part of your business.
Powerful Reporting and Analytics
Manage your business by exception with generic inquiries, flexible financial and operational reports, and connected Microsoft Power BI for analytics. Identify profitability by item and spot changing market trends and new customer demands.
Reduce IT Costs
Minimize License Fees and Infrastructure Costs with a Comprehensive Cloud ERP Application
Retailers and eCommerce companies invest heavily in technology to manage inventory to procurement and sales to accounting. Despite the availability of dozens of ERP applications, few organizations find everything they need in a single application. Merchants augment native ERP features with third-party applications, or they fill functional gaps with specialized software.
Third-party application license fees and related training, maintenance, and support costs are significant. Further, legacy software platforms are built on aging technology requiring substantial investments in the underlying infrastructure supporting the application.
Acumatica Cloud ERP reduces third-party application dependence with a comprehensive suite of connected business applications. The native cloud-based design and consumption-based licensing model eliminate infrastructure costs and user license fees.
“Almost every other ERP software charges monthly per user, which inevitably has executives trying to limit how many people really need simultaneous access. Acumatica’s novel way of charging based on transactions is well-suited for future growth.”
Reduce Application License Fees
Minimize your technology stack with a retail ERP system that includes native applications to manage all parts of your business. Acumatica provides recurring and deferred revenue, document management, CRM, project accounting, fixed assets, payroll, and other native applications. Connected commerce, point of sale, and field service extend Acumatica with intrinsic features to manage all parts of the business on a single platform.
Lower Costs for Training and Support
Training and support costs balloon as applications are bolted on to the ERP system. ERP systems that provide more functionality out-of-the-box are easier to learn with lower associated support costs.
Minimize Infrastructure Costs
On-premises ERP applications are built on archaic hardware, operating systems, and databases. The supporting infrastructure has licensing fees and associated costs for maintenance and support. Conversely, cloud-based ERP applications such as Acumatica eliminate infrastructure costs.
Eliminate User Licensing
Traditional ERP applications penalize businesses with user-based licensing. Acumatica is one of the only mid-market ERP applications encouraging unlimited users. Customers pay based on resource consumption, not users. Extend the application to every employee and enable collaboration with external customers, vendors, and business partners.
About Acumatica Retail Edition
Compete and Win with a Modern, Comprehensive, and Secure ERP Application
Acumatica helps retailers, distributors, and manufacturers boost sales, automate warehouse operations, optimize inventory, and streamline purchasing. Simplify item and inventory management with matrix items, lot and serial tracking, and configurable unit of measure conversions. Boost sales with flexible pricing, promotions, and embedded CRM for marketing and sales automation. Powerful replenishment features optimize stock levels to avoid rush orders and stockout situations with increased inventory turns and lower carrying costs. Perishable inventory management is easy with lot expiration dates for stock rotation and first-expired-first-out picking. Delight customers with omnichannel options, inventory stock reservations, faster order processing, and streamlined order fulfillment.
eCommerce connectors, point-of-sale integration, and field service applications extend Acumatica for companies that sell online (B2B or B2C) or provide after-sale services. Leverage automation, workflows, and document management to connect data and processes throughout the business for improved customer service, customer retention, and profitable growth.
“Acumatica makes us professional, modern—on the cutting-edge of ERP software.”
Transform Your eCommerce Business with a Future-Proof ERP Platform
Acumatica Retail Edition is a complete ERP system with deep business and supply chain management features and unmatched product breadth. The modern, cloud-based ERP application improves data visibility, reduces IT costs, boosts operational efficiency, and provides flexibility to enhance customer satisfaction.
Grow sales with an omnichannel strategy that allows customers to buy, pickup, and return products anyway they choose. Cater to each customer’s buying habits with embedded sales automation and integrated marketing tools.
Acumatica provides real-time views into order and inventory activities to keep ahead of potential bottlenecks and reduce costs.
Delight customers with specific pricing and promotions. Develop loyalty programs to reward the most profitable customers and retain them for life.
Best of all, know your ERP solution will grow with you. It is built on a scalable and future-proof cloud ERP platform with open architecture backed by the industry’s best value-added reseller (VAR) network.
“Acumatica has given us a robust eCommerce solution to keep us on the cutting edge. We have the flexibility and data access that we need to scale our business as we grow, and to identify and resolve potential problems to our customer’s satisfaction quickly.”
