Brightpearl Blog

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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Our top 5 ways to make your 2012 more successful than your 2011 Posted on January 17th, 2012 by Harriet Fletcher

Big retailers had an incredibly difficult 2011. Harder even than their 2010 – 10% more filed for bankruptcy in 2011 than in 2010. 183 in England and Wales to be precise. On the other hand, at Brightpearl we see plenty of examples of small, independent merchants – both retail and wholesale – who are thriving in the teeth of the downturn. 200+% growth in some cases! How are they pulling this off and what can we do together to make your 2012 look like their 2011?

As specialists in business management software for retailers and wholesalers, Brightpearl has a wealth of experience, both personally and through our customers, as to what can help merchants grow their business efficiently.  We’ve used this experience to put together a list of the top 5 things we recommend to lead to a more successful 2012.

1. Commit to software – Through deploying software that ties together your back end business processes such as CRM, inventory control and accounting with your sales channels, you have the opportunity to sell more and grow in 2012. Business automation leads to fewer mistakes and better tracking means you never miss a sale or sell something you cannot deliver.

2. Seek expert help – Look to experts for best practice advice on your business processes and procedures.  From fine tuning your inventory and stock control processes, to setting up reports to show your most profitable product lines – expert advice and the resulting improvements can help you save  wasting money in inefficient processes and sell more of your most profitable products.

3. Expand where you sell - Reach new customer bases by expanding into new sales channels.  Research in 2011 found half of all online retail traffic went to eBay, Amazon and Alibaba.  As a retailer you can no longer afford not to be selling via marketplaces such as eBay and Amazon as they represent a huge opportunity to reach millions of buyers.

4. Learn from others - There are hundreds if not thousands of successful small business retailers and wholesalers out there, we suggest you take every opportunity you can to share and collaborate on what works and what doesn’t in order to further your own business prospects.

5. Buy Brightpearl – Brightpearl helps you achieve all of the above!  Brightpearl ties your whole business together, automating back end processes and helping make your business more efficient, freeing up your time to focus on selling more.  Brightpearl employs a team of experts who are available to help you by providing affordable best practice advice, whether you need training, consultancy or someone to do it for you. Brightpearl also makes expansion easy, helping you to be everywhere you want to be, from marketplaces to online web-stores and in-store POS, we’ve got it covered. In 2012 Brightpearl intends to bring together successful independent merchants to foster learning and the secrets of success to help make 2012 the year of growth and profit.

So watch this space in the next few weeks for some important announcements from Brightpearl as well as an opportunity for you to get involved.  For your free Brightpearl 30 day trial, click here.

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Brightpearl’s Middle East Experience Posted on December 19th, 2011 by Harriet Fletcher

Brightpearl in the Middle East

The benefits that Brightpearl can bring a business spans geographies and one of our latest customers to sign up is The Bloomsbury Qatar Foundation Publishing (BQFP) in Qatar.  In this blog post we follow Justin Press in our professional services team out to Qatar, where he helped BQFP implement their Brightpearl solution.

Souq WaqifBQFP publish books in English and Arabic, promote the love of reading and writing to help establish a vibrant literary culture in Qatar and the Middle East, and offer training courses to encourage the transfer of publishing and related skills.

BQFP’s currently administrate their business using Excel and Word, with revenue recorded in spreadsheets and invoices drafted in Word. The finance team relied on manual communications for recording revenue, payment, stock levels etc. With geographic challenges (warehouses in Doha & Cairo), BQFP needed a solution that could be accessed with ease from anywhere over the web. Also, as staff are not familiar with any type of system, BQFP needed a solution with a very attractive graphical interface which would be intuitive in its use to their staff.

What we did

On signing up to Brightpearl, BQFP appointed the professional services team for a full implementation to kick start their journey on the app. With minimal experience of similar systems and little time to invest in building the solution, BQFB needed to hit the ground running to ensure best practice in such a system.

Data Import & Setup

Each sales rep had lists of their own customers & stock only.  So Justin’s first task was to collate all data and import it into Brightpearl, sorted into contact owners, teams and sales channels to ensure reporting and control of customers and revenue.

Business Analysis & process design

Justin spent time learning the various business processes at BQFB such as how stock is purchased and distributed via the printing contractors and distribution partners, and how stock was sold and distributed through the various sales channels. He was then able to perfectly map and create a sales workflow in Brightpearl where automatic email notifications are now sent to each user to prompt every task in the sales cycle. Also, by designing a universal process, management are now able to report revenue streams and stock movements through the various sales channels in the business.

All in all it was a really successful trip to set BQFP up in the Brightpearl system, Justin enabled them to accelerate their use of the platform and they were able to tap into his useful tips and advice.  Justin had a great experience, although he missed the occasional beer of an evening!

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The customer journey – from trepidation to trust Posted on December 7th, 2011 by Amy Monro

Brightpearl partners with Sagepay as our payment services provider.  In this guest blog post they offer some useful insight for you, regarding how to convert more customers on your website and make it as easy as possible for them to pay.  Find out more about our special offer with Sagepay.

Opening an online store can be a daunting process. CRM, stock control, invoicing and purchase order management can be a lot to think about when looking to ecommerce to sell your goods. Luckily, our Partner Brightpearl are taking the pain out of all of these business operations with their streamlined system, allowing retailers of all sizes to free up their resources and concentrate on maximising those all-important conversion rates.

Earlier this year we put together our e-business benchmark report, which showed that only 7% of website visitors end up completing a purchase. So, once you’ve got customers to your site, how do you keep them interested, enticed and assured enough to get them to the checkout? Once a shopper has hit your website and found exactly the product they’ve been searching for, they’ll be looking for reassurance. After all, in the online world, you ask your customers to hand over their cash before receiving any goods so you need your brand to instill trust in them.

We look at how to influence a purchase and make it easy for customers to pay, while the lovely team at Brightpearl take care of the rest!

Here are the key things that your customers will be looking for:

- Security policy
Make sure you have a security policy detailing how you keep customers personal data secure. We found that 78% of top performers have a clear security policy on their website.

- T’s and C’s
Keep your website Terms and Conditions short and to the point, and make them easily accessible for your customers.

- Clearly displayed delivery times
Keep your customer informed of when they can expect delivery of their goods so they don’t panic if it doesn’t arrive the next day. And don’t forget, consumer expectations are at an all time high and shoppers now not only want a good deal, they want it quickly. Free or next day delivery is another vital offering to help encourage customers to place their order with you.

- Money back guarantees , special offers and loyalty schemes
These tools are a great way to encourage shoppers to buy from your site. With the economy continuing to be a challenge, consumer bargain hunting is near universal. Anecdotal evidence from our survey respondents shows us that e-tailers aren’t just pushing out special offers through their site but also via newsletters, Facebook and Twitter- rewarding those who’ve opted to ‘like’ or ‘follow’ their brand.

- An easy to use site
User testing doesn’t have to cost a fortune. 73% of respondents to our survey with above average conversion rates test their site regularly for ease of navigation. But very few were spending more than £50, proving that honest feedback from family and friends is just as useful as using a third party company

- Previous customer reviews and testimonials
If you have case studies and quotes from happy customers then you should be shouting from the rooftops about it. No matter how much marketing you do, nothing is more effective than previous customers advocating your brand.

- Contact details
One of the common mistakes made by retailers is to hide away their company contact details. Putting contact details on every page, makes it clear to the customer that you’re available to talk if they encounter any issues or problems and won’t hide behind your site.

- Customised payment pages
We found that 61% of our higher-performing e-tailers have customised their payment process to ensure a consistant look and feel from the moment a customer clicks on the site. Branded, professional-looking payment pages provide customers with the reassurance they are looking for. Even lesser known brands should link their website to their payment pages visually. The combination of your logo and the strength of a well-known payment providers brand can work well for newly established businesses.

- Awards and certifications
Including any awards or certifications you have achieved reinforces the positive messaging around your brand and will help the shopper to see you as reliable and secure.

For more tips, statistics and best practices, download Sage Pay’s e-business benchmark report here: http://www.benchmarkyourebusiness.com/

Amy Monro
PR and Marketing Specialist, Sage Pay

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Brightpearl December release Posted on December 1st, 2011 by Chris Tanner

This month we see a range of awesome updates to the Brightpearl system, covering performance improvements, bug fixes and new features. Brightpearl 4.10 will be deployed across all our data centres over the next few days.

As the Christmas rush approaches, usage of the system has sky rocketed. We’re now serving many tens of millions of page loads every month. Keeping your Brightpearl account fast and responsive is of utmost importance to us, and we are focussing development efforts appropriately. We have three full teams of developers; working on performance, application and integrations respectively; which allows us to keep new features coming and usability improving as well as working on the infrastructure that powers it all.

In the new year we’ll be launching eBay and Magento integrations – if you’re interested in either of these then please email us (design@brightpearl.com) and we’ll give you the scoop, and access to an early preview.

Product seasons

Spring turns to summer, summer to fall, fall to winter … and with the seasons come different ranges of products. If you’re dealing in apparel then you may be seeing thousands of new SKUs every year, which you want to keep in your system for historical reporting purposes. In fact any business whos product lines change will have a need to “archive” certain items when they are no longer available. This release of Brightpearl sees a handy feature called “seasons” which lets you filter and segment your database as well as report on previous season sales. For full information have a look at our documentation here.

Coupons, discounts and parking sales in Point-Of-Sale

Following feedback from a number of our EPOS users we’ve added a raft of new features to your point of sale software. We’ll be talking more about these shortly, so here’s just a summary.

Coupons now supported at point of sale

Create discount coupons and print barcodes onto marketing material which your customers can then redeem at checkout. Ideal for bringing in those extra sales before Christmas!

Park / hold sales for later

There are many occasions where you might want to hold a sale and then come back to it later; now you can! Not only does Point-of-sale in Brightpearl let you park sales, from the back office you can easily see which store has parked sales, who created them, when they were last updated, and even generate reports for stagnant parked sales that need to be removed. You can now also add a reference to each sale as you create it in order to distinguish between different sales for the walk-in anonymous customer.

Order based discounting

In addition to the row-based discounting, Point of Sale supports a discount across the whole order; this also respects the “customer discount” setting you may have added for a customer in the back office admin screens.

Product information at your fingertips

Just add an item to the sale and click the name to see image, description, current inventory levels across all your stores AND also when any new stock is due to arrive. Empower your salespeople!

Other features and fixes

Along with the above, we’ve also been super busy on the Magento and eBay integrations, bug fixes and other engineering work including a move towards full UTF-8 character encoding. Eh? UTF-what? UTF-8 is a different data storage mechanism from what we have used historically, and now is the time to bring everything up to date. Every cloud software company has to keep up with modern standards, and adopting UTF-8 across all of our interface and database tables means that we are now right at the leading edge. We’ll be able to support many more character sets (including Polish and other Eastern European languages), as well as interface more effectively with other software apps. Our engineers have spent a lot of time getting this right, and over the next few weeks we’ll be updating your databases. You don’t need to do anything; it’s all done automatically behind the scenes. Every now and then you’ll get a popup when you log in to let you know that we’re tackling more of your data set. Sexy? Not particularly, but it’s an awesome step forwards that I’m proud to be able to announce.

For a full run-down of what’s going into 4.10 – have a look at our release notes.

 

 

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Speed up your homepage and compete with the big brands Posted on November 23rd, 2011 by Ben Halstead

The homepage of your website is probably your most important online asset for attracting visitors and converting them to customers and it’s really important that it loads quickly. You can spend hundreds of hours and a lot of money on SEO, but if it takes 20 seconds for your homepage to load, your potential customer will give up and just move on to the next link in Google’s search results. In actual fact a fast website will end up helping your SEO!

This is a real opportunity for small businesses because the homepage of most big websites is a furious battleground between all the different departments in a corporation: the sales team want as many products as possible on there, the design team want beautiful high resolution photos and the marketing team want all sorts of tracking widgets to monitor customer behaviour. The end result is a big bloated page which takes forever to load and takes months of wrangling to change.

As a small business owner, you’re in complete control of your homepage and can change it whenever you choose. To make the most of this advantage, I’ll need to give you a little bit of technical background, but feel free to skip ahead to our top ten recommendations at the end of this article!

Anatomy of a webpage

It’s easy to think of a webpage as a single file, like a Word document, but in fact each page can be made up of dozens and dozens of separate files.

Generally speaking, there are four types of files required to build a typical page – an HTML file, some images, one or more CSS files (stylesheets) and any number of Javascript files.

- The HTML file contains your text and the basic structure of a page as well as containing instructions on where to find all the other files your web browser will need to display the page correctly.
- Images are the pictures you see on the page.
- CSS files, or stylesheets, control the font sizes, colours and general design of the page.
- Javascript files can be used to add interactive features and customer tracking to the page.

When you click on a link in a web browser, the first thing that happens is your browser loads the HTML file for the page you want to see. It then scans through the HTML file to see which other files it needs to load. Until all these other files are loaded, your page won’t look or behave as it is supposed to. So the trick is to make sure all those files can be loaded as quickly as possible.

Top ten ways to tune your homepage

1. Give your homepage a physical

Your browser has built in tools to help you tune your homepage. Open up Chrome and go to your homepage. Hit F12 (or cmd + alt + j on a Mac) and press the ‘Network’ icon.

If you then refresh the page by pressing F5 (cmd + R) you’ll see a breakdown of all the files on your page and the time it takes to load them. At the bottom left you’ll see the number of files (requests) and the total size of your page.

The red vertical line on the timeline represents how long it took for your page to be loaded and completely ready to use. The holy grail is 1 second or less!

2. Put it on a diet

The easiest way of reducing the time taken to load your page is to reduce its size. You should aim for your homepage to be no more than 300-500kb in size (for reference, Google’s is about 120Kb). Make sure your images have been saved using the ‘optimise for web’ feature in Photoshop or whichever tool you prefer.

3. Host your site close to your customers

If your customers are mostly in North America, make sure your website is hosted in North America. You’ll be surprised at how much extra time it will take to load a file hosted on the other side of the planet! This is called latency and will affect every file needed to build your page.

4. Cut down on tracking

User tracking features, analytics and affiliate tracking schemes are a major contributors to a page feeling slow. Whenever possible, try and stick to a single tracking mechanism on your homepage.

5. Keep it simple…

The more files on your homepage, the slower it will be. If you look at pages optimised for speed (like the Google homepage) you’ll see there are very few images.

6. …but don’t forget the words

However, your homepage is very important for SEO and you’ll need to remember to have all your key SEO phrases in place.

7. Set your content free

Consider using a Content Distribution Network (CDN) like Amazon’s Cloudfront. These can be used to serve your images, stylesheets and Javascript files from Amazon’s servers rather than yours. This has several benefits: less pressure on your web server, content served from servers close to your customers and encouraging your browser to load more files in parallel.

8. Reduce, reuse, recycle

If you find yourself using lots of different Javascript files, consider merging them into a single file and ‘minifying’ that file.

9. Haven’t I seen you before?

If you use the same image or Javascript file again and again, encourage the browser to ‘cache’ those files so it doesn’t keep downloading them. This should be done automatically by your web server, but check in Chrome’s timeline. If the file is grayed out, it was found in the browser’s cache.

10. Stick to your guns

As your company grows, you will start to get the same pressures from sales, design and marketing as the big brands do. They will all want a piece of your homepage, but make sure that speed is always your primary goal.

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Black Friday – Are You Ready? Posted on November 22nd, 2011 by Harriet Fletcher

This coming Friday it’s Black Friday in the US, the day after thanksgiving which is a well know date in the retail world as representing the start of Christmas and one of the busiest days in the retail calendar.  Many shops open early and close late to make sure they get the most sales possible.  Black Friday is closely followed by Cyber Monday (28th Nov), the biggest online retail day of the year.

Retailers must make sure they are ready to maximise on the sales being made during this period!  If you haven’t already seen our 3 part series on “Getting Ready for Christmas”, there’s no time to waste, with the biggest dates in the retail calendar this weekend, and just a month to go to the big day itself.

Our Getting ready for Christmas series included …

Part one – Stock – the first in the series this blog post gives hints and tips on stock control. Have you got the inventory to fulfill orders?  Look at previous years best sellers and trends to make sure you have the right products in stock too.

Part two – Marketing - this post looks at tips for optimising your site so it’s user friendly and customers can find what they are looking for, ideas for places to market and advertise, as well as ensuring you get relevant traffic straight through to the most relevant page to increase the chance they’ll buy.

Part three – Customer Service – don’t forget about looking after your customers, communicating with them and helping them with their enquiries, this will make sure they come back time and again as well as recommending you to their friends!

A few practical ideas to think about before Black Friday:

•

 Do you have enough staff to cope with the rush? And if you do need to take on more people to service your customers have you made sure you’ve got enough tills? With Brightpearl you can take on extra EPOS tills for a short term period as there are no contracts etc
• Server space – do you have the infrastructure behind your website to cope with the extra influx of traffic? Have your website hosted in the Cloud means that you have access to the kind of infrastructure that can cope.
• Make sure your website is up-to-date. People get organised for Black Friday by making lists so make sure what you have in store matches what you are saying on your site to make their experience consistent and easier.
• Make sure you have enough bags, gift wrap, cellotape, receipt paper and gift certificates in store so that you don’t run out when the rush hits.
• Position impulse items wisely to increase sales. Have them by the POS tills, next to the queues or as related items on your website.
• Make sure you have enough petty cash on hand to be able to give your customers change.
• Be aware that shoplifting may increase when you have so many more people in your store. Ask staff to be extra vigilant or think about hiring a security guard or installing a camera to police your store.
• Be prepared for returns. These are likely to increase after a bit rush of customers. Make sure you have enough staff to cope with this and encourage them to upsell or cross sell when the returns are happening. An exchange is always better than a refund.

 
It goes without saying that Brightpearl can help you with your stock control, marketing and customer service.  From our integrated software which automatically updates stock records whether you are selling online or in store, plus producing reports for products reaching low stock thresholds, through to customer service with our CRM and helpdesk modules to help you manage your customer queries and communications – Brightpearl makes it all seamless.  Then from a marketing perspective Brightpearl has a neat integration with mailchimp making emailing your database  possible at the touch of a button (it’s probably worthwhile emailing your database ahead of this crucial weekend to remind them about you and your product offerings!). And for customers taking our website and ecommerce modules, we have some website templates ready built utilising best practice to help you sell more through your website, or you can use our professional services team who can provide more bespoke services.

In a nutshell….Make sure your business is in the right position to consolidate on Black Friday, Cyber Monday and Christmas sales this year!

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