Brightpearl Blog

A positive sign of growth in the UK from eBay Posted on February 22nd, 2012 by Harriet Fletcher

eBay announced the UK as its fastest growing territory, outpacing even their two largest marketplaces – US and Germany.  The number of Britons using the UK eBay site has seen double digit growth year on year, at 15%.

Not only is this a really positive sign of retail growth in the UK but it also proves the value for companies using eBay as a sales channel to help them on the road to growth and profits.

At Brightpearl we definitely believe eBay is a great sales channel for retailers and we’ve made it even easier for our customers to tap into this channel following our recent eBay announcement, but we also believe that a multichannel retail strategy is the key for retail success. Recent research suggests that multichannel retailers – i.e. those selling via more than one distribution channel – marketplaces, webstore, in-store, mobile – can generate up to four times the sales per customer compared to companies that rely on only one channel – why is this?

It’s being driven by both retailers and consumers.

Retailers are looking to spread risk and increase exposure to as many potential buyers as possible through adopting multiple channels.  High street retailers are looking to get online to make up for lost sales on the high street.  Online retailers are looking to maximise touch points through not just marketplaces or a webstore but by having both.

Consumers are shopping in different ways, they are always so quick to adopt different methods to buy and communicate – taking advantage of the benefits of the different sales channels e.g. the transparency of price and reviews offered through marketplaces vs the ability to touch, feel and assess quality by seeing the physical product vs the ease of purchasing something through a mobile device. If you have brand continuity and touch points across every sales channel you are more likely to see the customer purchase, wherever it is they choose to buy.

By adopting a multichannel strategy Retailers create a win-win situation. Consumers get more choice about where they can make purchases and Retailers are more likely to  increase sales through maximising customer touch points.

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The pitfalls of overselling – reap what you sow Posted on February 16th, 2012 by Tom Glason

Unfortunately, and research has proven this (http://www.jstor.org/pss/40472060), selling has been negatively portrayed consistently by scriptwriters for over 100 years. They have given us Willy Loman, Herb Tarlek, Delboy Trotter and my personal favourite, Blake from Glengarry Glen Ross. However, it’s hard to imagine anything more fundamental to the economy than selling. But it’s safe to say that when selling is bad, it is horrid.

We all abhor the over-selling salesman, and rightly so. Overselling, or ‘mis-selling’, is the ethically questionable practice of misrepresenting or misleading a buyer about the characteristics of a product or service, typically by overstating its capabilities in the hope that this will lead to the sale.

At Brightpearl – and this probably applies to any business that offers a product or service on a subscription basis with no contractual commitment from the customer – we are passionate about rooting out overselling in every form. For if we’ve overstated the capabilities of the product during the sales process, this will soon become evident once the customer starts using the software ‘in anger’ within their business, and that’s when the real anger will set in – resulting in them cancelling their subscription very quickly and a bad taste being left in their mouth.

We’re acutely aware that if we don’t set expectations properly with prospects about what Brightpearl can and can’t do, the following is likely to occur:

1. Implementation pain; moving business systems is hard enough without the added burden of trying to migrate to software which isn’t ‘fit for purpose’. The implementation is likely to be hugely frustrating for the client and lead to excessive drain on our support team as help-desk tickets come flooding in!

2. Feature requests get over-looked; the client may decide to work through the challenges of implementation, but you can guarantee they’ll be very vocal about requesting those missing features that the salesperson implied existed already or were “due out in a release very soon!” We don’t have the luxury of a development team big enough to build every feature requested and this will inevitably lead to further disappointment and frustration for the client.

3. Churn; the scourge of any subscription business that relies so heavily on keeping customers for a certain period of time in order to get a return on the investment of acquiring that customer. David Skok, serial entrepreneur turned investor in subscription-based cloud businesses like Brightpearl, blogs in detail about the need to manage the relationship between cost of acquiring a customer (CAC), life time value (LTV) and churn. His rule of thumb is that businesses like Brightpearl need to ensure that the LTV of each customer (i.e. how much they pay in subscription revenues during their lifetime as a client) is at least 3 x the cost of acquiring that customer. Given that Brightpearl is focused on providing SMB’s with great value, affordable software, understandably, the average revenue each customer pays us per month is not high. It’s therefore essential that we keep clients as happy users for as long as possible!

4. Negative feedback; if it’s true that a happy customer may tell one person but an unhappy customer will tell 10, then the worst thing we can do as a business is ‘sell’ them a product that isn’t going to deliver the value they’d expected – leading to frustration and dissatisfaction! In this world of social media and online reviews, businesses can’t afford to leave a bad taste in the mouths’ of their customers.

So as you can see, ‘overselling’ is not only painful for customers, but also the businesses that are unfortunate enough to have salespeople working for them who take the ‘say anything to win the deal’ approach. At Brightpearl, we work hard to recruit and develop sales professionals who are great at what they do; leading, guiding, educating and directing buyers to help them solve a problem or achieve a desired outcome in an ethical, customer focused way.

So when a business takes out a trial of Brightpearl, they can rest assured that the salesperson will be calling to understand their business requirements and fit with our product, not sell to them at any cost.

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Price groups and price tiers for your Magento store … and more! Posted on February 15th, 2012 by Chris Tanner

Hot off the heels of last week’s major release, we have some more excellent additions to Brightpearl. Does the team ever sleep?! Full release notes are here. Highlights in 4.16 include:

Support for multiple price lists and price tiers on your integrated Magento store

Brightpearl - Magento integration now supports price groups and tiers

This means that you can run both your B2B AND your B2C online stores from the same Brightpearl and Magento setup. Use Brightpearl’s powerful tools to handle all your products, with the changes being pushed automatically up to Magento. Just connect your Brightpearl price lists to your Magento customer groups and the rest just happens. Powerful stuff.

Find out more about the Magento integration on our YouTube channel.

Edit prices including tax on the variants screen

Edit tax-inclusive prices in bulk

Last release we introduced the ability to bulk edit prices across product variants (if you missed it, the video is here). Now you can work with the tax-inclusive amount if your price list is set to “show prices including tax”. Much easier for you folks in retail-land. Don’t forget that whenever you see a price in Brightpearl that’s underlined, it includes tax!

Custom columns on order templates (quotes, invoices etc)

Custom columns on order and quote templates

This is a really handy improvement that many of you have been waiting for a long time. You may or may not have realised that you can customise the columns that show on each of your different templates (read how) – what we’ve done this release is let you add extra product identifiers (EAN, UPC and ISBN) as well as any of your product custom fields. This now lets you add pretty much any product information you like to your templates, including things like Inco Terms, expiry dates and so on. The possibilities are endless!

Export goods-out notes to CSV

Export Goods-out notes to CSV

Many of you work with 3rd party shipping, fulfilment or warehouse services like i-fulfilment. Unless you’ve built a full warehouse integration over API (we’ve a whitepaper if you want to know how), you’ve not had many other ways to get information to the warehouse. Passing information to your fulfilment company or even carrier electronically is much more sensible, so we’ve given you a CSV export for goods-out notes (link at the top right of the goods note print page as per the screen grab above). It’s a fixed column format, so you’ll need to configure the receiving software to make sure the right columns are used. Most carrier systems let you define the structure of incoming files. Whilst we explore the different possibilities and use cases for this feature, it’s still technically in “beta”. We’d really love to know how you’re getting on with this, and which systems you’re dropping the data into. Send your suggestions for mods or improvements to design@brightpearl.com!

We’ve also completed a few of your feature requests from the feedback forums. Not the big ones (we’ve only had small slots recently) but hopefully ones that you’ll see immediate benefit from. Stuff like a “net value” column on the Top customers report, excluding the weight of bundles on orders, and an easier way to handle “earlier unreconciled transactions” when working with your bank statements.

Of course there are a few bug fixes too, plus a stack of engineering work going on to tune up servers and ensure we are one step ahead of the game. There’s a big project under way to rebuild our infrastructure on faster technology, but that’s a story for another blog post.

How are we doing? Like what you see? Let us know below :)

 

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Do you have time to go out tonight? Posted on February 14th, 2012 by Harriet Fletcher

Valentine’s day is here again and today of all days it’s time to leave work early and spend some quality time with your Mr or Mrs. The last thing you need is to get held up with admin tasks and stock takes at the end of the day.

We built Brightpearl so you could spend less time on admin, and more on growing your business or staying out of the office. And we chose to make it entirely web-based so that if you do need to check something you can easily do so while you’re at home on your laptop or ipad.

Take a look at Brightpearl today to free up time, leave early and go out tonight…

… although we can’t promise that you’ll get tonight off (you’re probably going to be excitedly playing with your new Brightpearl account…) but next year you’ll be able to take the whole day out !

Happy Valentine’s day from Brightpearl!

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The taxman says he’s coming for eBay sellers: how to be ready Posted on February 10th, 2012 by James Marchant

This is a guest blog by James Marchant, one of the founders and CEO of Marchant Dice, a manufacturer and distributor of CNC equipment based in the UK with customers around the world.  James has been selling on eBay since 2003 and his own webstore since 2006, he has been a Brightpearl customer since early 2011.

An article posted in the Daily Mail on Wednesday covers the latest announcement by UK HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC) that it has used ‘new technology’ to identify parts of the UK economy that are likely to have a high number of missing tax returns. eBay and other ‘e-marketplaces’ have been identified as one part of the economy where this is indeed the case, which is particularly interesting for us for obvious reasons!

The HMRC reaffirmed plans to launch campaigns specifically targeted at those who trade on eBay – to ensure that VAT returns are being produced regularly and accurately. The intention is to launch these before the end of next month.

If you’re an eBay seller, you’re provided with a number of online tools to help you sell, and then help you ship, however it’s then a manual case of dealing with the accounting and tax implications of that sale. This means that it often takes second place in your priorities, leading to late, rushed and inaccurate VAT returns.

But not any more! The HMRC announcement this week is timed perfectly with the launch of the Brightpearl eBay integration, which lets you handle your eBay accounting automatically, accurately and immediately.

 

ebay profit and loss report in brightpearl

 

My own research from talking to companies we deal with as well as other local business people has indicated that people and companies legally trading on eBay as well as other marketplaces can and really do struggle to maintain their accounts in order to fulfil these requirements by HMRC. Our own company Marchant Dice Ltd manufactures and distributes CNC milling machines and components worldwide through multiple sales channels including eBay as well as our own website, telephone and cash sales as well as listing on Amazon in the near future. Selling over multiple channels is required more than ever in the current economic environment but it brings about its own headaches which we have suffered with for the last 9 years before discovering Brightpearl and the latest eBay integration.

Before the Brightpearl eBay integration was launched we had to run at least 2 separate sales order systems with an accounting package over the top in order to bring these sales channels together. This meant for us two excel workbooks for sales order processing and a third excel workbook for import into our accounting package which recorded the invoices generated to track sales values, tax and produce consecutive invoice numbers.

Needless to say stock control was a near impossibility and even with the best efforts, it quickly became out of sync over the various channels leading to customer service issues as well as a lot of wasted time and resources.

The Solution

Brightpearl has totally transformed the way we run our business in a whole host of ways. It has meant for the first time we have been able to bring all our sales from all sales channels together into one system. This means no wasted time fiddling between excel workbooks which looking back ….well I’d rather not!

The Brightpearl eBay integration is the single biggest breakthrough in terms of how we run our business that we have ever had.

To have eBay sales automatically appear inside Brightpearl without any need to be copying and pasting from eBay or PayPal emails is a massive relief and saves an enormous amount of time. The eBay buyer details that are automatically brought in to the system allows us to tie orders to a particular customer together over multiple sales channels often saving the customer shipping costs. It also allows us to target specific customers with marketing material based on their sales history as well as providing a great service.

As well as this the Brightpearl eBay integration has FINALLY allowed us to implement a stock control system that is always up to date across all sales channels and provides a real time accounting system so we can track everything from profit to TAX!

This new crackdown on eBay sellers is most certainly not a problem for us and there is no reason it should be for you either!

Find out more about how the Brightpearl eBay integration works.

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Brightpearl transforms multichannel offering with eBay and Magento Posted on February 8th, 2012 by Harriet Fletcher

Along with some other really cool stuff released in 4.15 today, we’re delighted to launch the addition of  two new online sales channels to Brightpearl. Customers can now connect their eBay listings and Magento-based stores with Brightpearl.

eBay needs no introduction, other than to remember that it’s still the largest marketplace for goods online. Whether you’re an existing eBay seller or you’re looking to start selling on eBay, it’s now a whole lot easier and less painful with the ability to sync your eBay sales, inventory and prices in real time into Brightpearl.

Magento is the leading ecommerce platform used worldwide, and is the most frequently requested integration by our customers. Adding Magento now gives customers another choice in their ecommerce platform, with the benefit of having all orders, inventory and price data updated simultaneously with Brightpearl.

We want to make sure that adding new channels doesn’t create new headaches on the back end. Using Brightpearl customers can scale smoothly across all channels — online and offline.

Check out the whole multichannel retail solution from Brightpearl and learn more on our webinar next Wednesday 15th, register here

 

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Exciting Times for Brightpearl Users Posted on February 2nd, 2012 by Chris Tanner

Wow, what an exciting time for Brightpearl users! There’s something big on the horizon for next week. I can’t give you all the details just yet (read more here), but I do want to let you know about all the other excellent features coming to a screen near you soon.

Rather unusually for us, we’ve not pushed out a public release in over 6 weeks, which means that release 4.15 is jam-packed. The top level summary is below, but I’d recommend you have a good look through the full release notes.

Variant / options management

Most of you are dealing with hundreds of product lines each day, and in many cases this involves clothing or footwear; products that typically have many sizes and colours. Brightpearl handles inventory of the individual items well; and now we’ve made it even easier to work with options and variants. The crux of the new variants management is the “size/colour matrix” – although not restricted to sizes and colours at all. In fact you can have any attributes under the sun, and even up to four within one matrix. Navigate around the grid using arrow keys, add items to orders using the grid layout, lookup inventory using the grid to quickly see what other colours and sizes you have in stock… the list goes on. Have a look at the video here for a full overview – and have a look at the release notes for information around how we’ve upgraded your data to match the new system.

Product type

You can now specify the type of product you’re working with. At the moment this is useful for reports, and for streamlining the options management process. We’ll soon be adding more capabilities into the “product type” concept. Watch this space!

Faster interface

Every single release, we introduce something to speed up the system. Along with a number of deeper architectural changes that you don’t see, this release we’ve updated almost all the icons in the app to something called “sprites”. In essence, this means that your browser doesn’t need to be communicating with the Brightpearl servers more than is absolutely necessary.

Point of Sale

The Brightpearl EPOS module is going from strength to strength – and this release we introduce the ability to take deposits for a sale, look up products at the till (or on your store iPad) without needing a sale, and a way to quickly switch between staff simply by typing in a new PIN.

So – have a good read through the full release notes. When can you get all this goodness? We’ll be updating all accounts starting from the 8th Feb. We’ve already upgraded many of our user-panel; if you’d like to be part of the early takers, provide feedback on designs and features, then pop us an email: design@brightpearl.com

Chris

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Release early, release often Posted on January 31st, 2012 by Ben Halstead

And listen to your customers. This is a quote from an influential essay on software development called ‘The Cathedral and the Bazaar’ by Eric S Raymond. Put simply, the goal of software companies is to put useful, working features in the hands of their customers as quickly and frequently as possible.This might sound obvious, but it’s only in the last ten years that this has become an accepted approach to building software. Many companies still subscribe to the ‘traditional’ approach to building software which starts with someone dreaming up every possible feature they would ever like to see and then not releasing anything until everything is complete.

The theory is that customers only ever receive rich, complete and bug-free software, but in reality it means:

  1. The software company can only release their product a couple of times a year at best and there are so many new features it can be overwhelming.
  2. The world has often moved on. The software industry moves so quickly that features which may have seemed vital when a project began are just forgotten footnotes when it finally complete.

The opposite approach is to have small, regular releases where features are delivered to customers in the simplest useful form and then fleshed out in subsequent releases. This process is called iterative development and means:

  1. Customers get their hands on new functionality as soon as possible
  2. Customers can provide feedback about what is working, what’s not and what’s missing very quickly.
  3. Risk is low – if the feature is scrapped because of negative feedback, only a short amount of time and effort has been wasted.

Iterative development is at the core of a group of ‘software development methodologies’ (processes for building software) collectively known as ‘agile‘. Here at Brightpearl we use a version of agile called Scrum.

We work to a two week cycle called a sprint, and break our teams (developers, testers and business owners) into groups of ten or fewer called scrums. During a sprint, each scrum plans, builds and tests as many features as it can.  All of these features are completed to a standard where we could release them to customers if we so choose.

This short time scale leads to an extremely focused, productive and intense working environment where we are always busy. It also means that we have to very carefully choose the work we include in each sprint. Every new feature, bug fix, performance upgrade and usability improvement that we would dearly love to deliver is evaluated against each other to decide what brings the most benefit to the largest number of our customers.

At the end of most sprints, we release a new version of Brightpearl and the eagle-eyed among you will notice that our three figure version number creeps upwards.  We completed 37 releases in 2011 and sometimes, when we’re especially proud of something, you’ll notice that the first number moves up a notch.

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Changing your business systems Posted on January 25th, 2012 by Dave White

Changing business software at first glance could seem somewhat daunting, but it really doesn’t have to be.  At Brightpearl we help numerous companies migrate to our software and as Director of Services and Support I’ve put together some handy tips if you’re thinking about changing systems for your own business.

Firstly, research what it is you need for your business.  What is your current set up, why isn’t it working and what are the key things you need from a new system?  The last thing you want to do is choose a system that doesn’t actually do what you intended it to. To help choose the right software I recommend you put together a score sheet of criteria you need and rate each solution you are reviewing against this.

Once you have chosen your software solution, as tempting as it may be to get ‘stuck in’ straight away, I would strongly advise you against this approach! The best implementations are well planned and thought out. Put together a realistic schedule for implementation which allows you enough time without rushing it, but not too much time that you lose impetus half way through.

As part of your planning process ensure you learn about your new software – read the manuals and ‘getting started’ instructions, join any webinars or demos on offer, watch videos and generally immerse yourself in whatever documentation is available.

Finally, if you have any doubts about being able to do it yourself then get expert help.  Some of the worst implementations I have seen are those companies who try and go it alone but don’t have the time or resources to dedicate to it.  Paying for a little bit of professional services expertise up front can save you both time and money further down the line, when you then find out your business system hasn’t been set up properly to enable you to run your business as efficiently as possible.

If you follow these 4 simple steps the road to implementing new software for your business can be a lot smoother, you are more likely to use it properly and in doing so, you’ll reap the rewards of greater efficiency for your business.

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Customer Focus: Lahloo Tea – EPOS for multichannel retail and wholesale Posted on January 23rd, 2012 by Penny Edwards

We recently caught up with Kate Gover managing director of Lahloo Tea, who uses Brightpearl to manage her small retail and wholesale business. Utilising Brightpearl’s powerful multichannel capabilities to sell in-store in their tea room, online on their website as well as to wholesale and trade customers, she talks to us about how Brightpearl helps them to overcome the seemingly impossible challenge of tying all these channels together. Take a look at the video below to get the full story on how Brightpearl helps Lahloo to manage their business better.

Video transcript

I started Lahloo Tea three and a half years ago. I spent most of my life disliking tea and still don’t really like normal – what people call ‘normal tea’. It wasn’t until about 10 years ago that I tasted a japanese green tea and was just blown away by the delicate flavour and also how much flavour there was, and it was really that that took me on this kind of random obsession with hunting out tea that I really liked.

For the first year it was predominantly farmers markets, food festivals and events like that, but with demand from trade customers we realised that there was an opportunity, and so we launched both that side of the business as well as an online shop two and a half years ago. The latest development in October 2011 was we opened our first store and tea rooms.

Brightpearl’s really helpful in integrating online, wholesale, trade, retail, the cafe, and tying it altogether would seem like it would be almost impossible. It’s rare to find an EPOS system that works with a wholesale system, so being able to use Brightpearl for every bit of it means that at any given time if we’re out of stock of a product, for example, it can’t be sold in the shop, or online, or to a wholesale customer. So from a customer service point of view, it’s brilliant.

Being able to just log on and tap in and see when that customer last placed an order, or was last invoiced, or if they haven’t paid is really important. It just facilitates and also enables us to keep in touch with customers much better.

It’s really exciting!

Do you have a retail or wholesale business? Check out how Brightpearl can integrate your systems and sales channels, from your stock control, EPOS, ecommerce, and more, to help you to become a truly multichannel business.

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