There’s no ignoring drop shipping as a viable business model for small and medium-sized businesses selling products online. It has opened the floodgates to allow entrepreneurs — many of them first-time business owners — to sell low-cost products from China while their supplier handles inventory and shipments. In this article, we’ll focus on reviewing its best features and how they can help you improve your drop shipping workflow.
About EMERGE App
EMERGE App is a fully-featured cloud-based order, purchase and inventory management solution. It also integrates with other e-commerce software and marketplaces such as eBay, Amazon, Shopify, WooCommerce and Magento. In doing so, it aims to consolidate all your sales orders in one place. As such it is like a Swiss Army knife of inventory software for businesses that deal in physical goods and sell through multiple sales channels.
Time-Saving Workflow
For drop shipping sales EMERGE App offers a semi-automated workflow that keeps you in full control of the process. This may not sit well with sellers who want a fully automated drop shipping process. However, it is obvious that much thought has been put into their workflow because things can and will go wrong with drop shipments. You can intervene anytime and control the pace of the drop shipping process.
Firstly, it lets you assign a default supplier to each of your products. So when you create a drop shipping purchase order, your default supplier will automatically be chosen. This saves you time and removes uncertainty as there is no more hunting for and guessing the right supplier for the products.
Your sales orders are then automatically imported from your e-commerce stores or EMERGE Cart, their B2B purchasing platform. EMERGE Cart is bundled for free with EMERGE App. It allows you to create purchasing accounts for your favourite customers, lets customers browse a personalised product catalogue, and then check out with a familiar shopping cart metaphor.
Handle Complicated Orders With Ease
With a sales order, you can drop ship all the items in the order or some of them. For each item in an order you can even select individual suppliers to drop ship from. This way items in one order can be conveniently drop shipped from multiple suppliers if you want to. This gives you the flexibility in the event a supplier has just stocked out on a certain product but is able to ship the rest of the items
The next step is to issue a drop shipping purchase order so that your supplier can ship the items directly to your customer. Here, you can do it from within the sales order, another time-saving shortcut. You need not click between different screens while trying to remember the sales order number that you’re working on. Once a purchase order has been created you can convert it to a drop ship shipment with a click.
Finally, you can toggle the shipment status once your customer has received the drop shipped items from your supplier. This will change the status of the delivery order to Delivered. At the sales order listing a delivery van icon can be seen next to the order. So at a glance, you can see which orders have been fulfilled and which ones are awaiting delivery. This is important as your supplier is responsible for shipping the orders out on time and accurately.
Conclusion
EMERGE App is a powerful and fully-featured order, purchase and inventory management solution that handles drop shipping orders well. It gives you complete control over your drop shipping workflow as orders make their way to shipments. While this may mean more human effort is needed to process drop shipping orders, you get the ability to intervene and fix things in return. I highly recommend EMERGE App for power users and there is a no-risk, free account to try.
