March 2021 - 18

TECHNOLOGY
Ecommerce:
Lessons from
Listening to IGCs
There are several considerations to
make when developing an ecommerce
strategy.
By Sam Kirkland
B
y now, everyone has had conversations about
ecommerce with industry leaders, providers or
businesses who have implemented an ecommerce
solution this past year. I would like to share what I have
learned from working with our customers over the past
12 months as they have implemented ecommerce solutions
in their businesses.
As local independent garden centers are looking to grow
revenue, I believe it will be difficult to match 2020 results
without an ecommerce solution in 2021. As we welcome new
customers to our industry, we must offer solutions for how
they want to shop. There is a growing proportion of consumers
that shop online; it's at a point now where we need to address
their shopping habits if we want their business.
Setting Goals and Vision of Ecommerce
Let's start with the main resonating goals of ecommerce.
Ecommerce allows your business to be open 24/7 and your
products available for purchase long beyond closing time. By
offering consumers the ability to shop anytime they want,
18 | LAWN & GARDEN RETAILER | MARCH 2021
many businesses
have reduced hours of
operation, and some have even
reduced the number of days they are
open. The other main goal is to attract new
consumers and to keep welcoming back the new
customers who visited your garden centers in 2020.
To achieve these two goals, there are some major value
points to make for a solution that integrates your in-store and
online systems - starting with labor. One central system that
controls inventory, pricing, and product information means
one place to make changes, additions and deletions. There
is no need to update your point-of-sale system, then go to
another document to update, and then load that into your
ecommerce site.
With an integrated solution, there is only one place to make
a change and you're done - thus saving hours of manual data
entry labor and helping prevent mistakes between systems.
The second value point to integration is it allows businesses
to be nimble and react quicker to changes in products. Pricing
and inventory are updated in real time, giving your customers
a more consistent experience.
Tips for Getting Started
As I have worked with retailers, the discussion always comes
to: what should I sell online, and how do I select SKUs for my
ecommerce site? Two words should be top of mind: popular
and profitable. Within the Epicor Eagle system, we have the
ability to double rank inventory with two criteria - highest
velocity (most units sold) and most profitable SKUs (we call
these our AA items). We score items from AA down to our DD
items (SKUs that lack sales and offer low profit).
For ecommerce inventory, I have seen more success with

March 2021

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