Wholesale
Industry
BSimple has been designed in a way that aligns with a lot of distribution and wholesale industry type businesses as well as business that manufacture or improve a raw product into something refined (ie. Coffee). The Wholesale industry as a term is very broad and we like it that way. To be fair, there hasn’t been a single business that we haven’t found a quick and easy win with the massive range of features that BSimple has – and given the flexible design and onboarding process, additional functionalities are easy to add and extend as required.
With such a broad vertical we typically find that each business has it’s own set of unique problems. Having said that, one of the biggest savings in any wholesale business is serving the repeat customer with a simple and quick ordering process and consisely getting that order into there hands and invoicing it. This really is the core business problem that BSimple solves.
Next you can easily find functionality that the inventory management supplies that may be superior to the existing platform – yes that’s right, most business who are in the Wholesale Industry would already have a system for managing their inventory – however I have met one guy who is in packaging and just has it all in his head – Totally crazy! Let’s just say the inventory management and ordering sold it for him in a heartbeat.
The BSimple approach to solving cashflow is the final pillar in the 3x core pillars of functionality that business in the wholesale industry need. With a simple to use and secure method for customers to load up and manage their credit card, and on the back end an easy to schedule approach to collecting funds on the due day, or whatever other timing method that takes your fancy.
Software and computers are really really really good and doing repeatable tasks. Doing a +1 operation on 5 boxes of a SKU is very easy for a computer. Locating an image for a random sentence (from the computers perspective) is very difficult. There are some things the BSimple platform really leverages the strengths of customers for – there are other things it relies on it’s human overlords to dictate and check.
The software will collect the orders, but its up to the humans to check it. Always sanity check orders before printing/approving.
The software will track your inventory, but it doesn’t control the humans handing it in the warehouse, the mistakes, the putting in the wrong place, the inability for humans to count means that eventually the software will look like it’s unable to track the inventory as it will be so far out of whack. But is it really the software’s fault? Thats why we have Stocktakes built into BSimple, so you can walk around (usually with an iPad) and do the stocktake live in the system).
The broad nature of Wholesale B2B means that you may have 10 SKU’s, or 10,000. Either way, you need to concisely collect orders, process invoices and manage inventory. BSimple does these exceedingly well!
Now integrating BSimple into your business can swiftly change your business and give you back the time you currently waste on admin. But, and there is always a but, it does take a pretty good upfront time commitment to get it running smooth.
There are jobs you cannot just escape from:
– Loading customer details (hack: maybe we can import from {Xero linkto}?)
– Loading inventory (hack: maybe you can export in CSV from your current system?)
– Assigning images to all inventory items? (Hack: there are no hacks for this sorry)
– Building the correct order items for each customer (hack: this is critical no hacks here)
One other thing to consider is, because BSimple was built by business owners and operators, things may not be exactly the same as you have seen in other platforms. Things may be done a little differently. We welcome you to change our mind on how we have designed BSimple – because id’ be seriously impressed if you or any other platform does something in a quicker or more efficient way!
BSimple creates time for wholesale industry businesses through the elimination of triple handling customer data, customer orders, inventory and purchasing. Your customers basically create the final invoice. Inventory adjustments are not required because you can check and validate and pick and pack orders before approving invoices, adjusting the order as required so that approved invoices (that affect the inventory upon approval) are 100% correct every time.
Looking for a free sales person? BSimple is here to show you how the big guys do it. Got a new product? Awesome – add the item in the inventory and load a picture, create a “Special New Product” category and assign the new item to the category, “force” it upon all your customers and adjust the category display order it to be at the top, and watch the $$ flow through! We did this with one customer; we got a special order of mop heads + mop sticks, as seperate items. We screwed them together, put a rather average price on it (ie. expensive) and within the first week of adding it to the BSimple system (as described above) we sold 40 of them. We actually had to take it down the following week as we sold out.