Mail Order Management - How to Manage Your Mail Order Business
Managing a mail order business is something which you might be finding somewhat bewildering, to say the least! However, we are here to help you in the process. There are a number of basic issues you need to consider when you are getting started in the business of mail order management.
In order to find out how much easier mail order management can become using our TOPS software, please see our presentation.
Mail Order Management - Credit Card Processing
In fact, in order to manage a mail order business, you need to start at the end! Yes, sounds ridiculous doesn't it, but what we mean is that you need to consider how your customers are going to pay for their goods, and then work backwards from that! Very few consultants will tell you this, but let us explain. If customers are not standing in your shop, they have to find a way of getting their money into your 'till' and it is quite obvious that they will prefer to use a credit card especially if they are placing an order online. Unless your customers are delightfully old fashioned, few are willing to write out an order and a cheque, then go to the local postbox! In fact it is just this situation that drives customers whose postboxes are not round the corner to use online services.
So how are you going to process their credit cards? This is one of the those mind-boggling areas of mail order management when you are new to it. It will cost you money before a penny arrives in your 'till' and there are all sorts of "ifs and buts" - one place which will give you some idea of costs is the DTI electronic payments website where you can create a possible scenario and be given the various amounts different payment service providers might charge. See also our page on back-end credit card processing for more about the credit card processing aspect of mail order management.
Choosing a Shopping Cart for your Mail Order Business
Now, supposing you have chosen your credit card processor and been accepted for a merchant account - then the next major step is to find a shopping cart that will work with that credit card processor - most do, but before you choose, check it out! Nothing worse than spending days building your webshop to find it won't work with the credit card processor you have chosen. We have some partners we work with and some of these come with no up-front costs - always a boon to anyone setting up a mail order business. See our page on shopping carts for more about the webshop aspect of mail order management.
Building a website
You may also need a website. A webshop may not be enough on its own to attract customers. However, what use is a website, or a webshop, if no-one can find it?! Many mail order businesses spend thousands of pounds on a beautiful-looking website and shopping cart, but they get no orders because no one can find it on a search engine via any commonly used relevant keywords! It is vital therefore, that your website is "optimised" for search engines. Ideally, it is best that this is done during the actual process of building your website, because it can be extremely difficult to optimise a site for search engines at a later date, if it has not been built with this in mind. Moreover, the field of search engine optimisation is full of unethical companies using fraudulent tricks to get your site ranked by the search engines - and sometimes banned when a competitor finds out and reports you to the search engines for abuse! Please consult us for our expert advice on this first. It can be one of the areas of mail order management where the costliest mistakes can be made.
Dealing with other orders
Despite having a webshop, orders will still arrive by other means - phone, fax and ordinary snail mail. This is the part of mail order management with which you are perhaps most likely to be already familiar. We would remind you that the image you convey to your customers is all-imortant - they need to feel that your mail order business is well-managed and well-established. For example, you need to be aware that customers are not impressed by a fax number that is the same as your telephone number. It may not be necessary to have an actual fax machine because you can use fax software.
A problem can also arise when you need to send a completed form not generated within your PC to someone - this will require a scanner. These days, a combined fax, scanner and printer is a very cost-effective and simple way of solving this part of your mail order management process. If you are sending out mailings a duplex printer which will print on the back can cut weeks out of the time it takes to prepare mailings to your customers.
Now, we realise we are assuming that your mail order business already has a computer - we suppose it has got to the position that no-one can be in any business without one these days! Which is how we got to be doing what we are doing now - computerising an existing mail order business in order to make it capable of processing more orders. So you will appreciate that we have been there! If you are in the position of having to choose computer equipment, and you are new to the mail order management field, it can be very hard to make the right choices when you have not yet got the business to know what the parameters might be. We are able to offer friendly help and advice on purchasing and setting up your computer and associated equipment - including also how to ensure that your data is kept secure.
Mail Order Management: Conclusion
Right, we are beginning to look as if we are in business here. We have found an efficient way to handle our customers' money. We have a website which can be found easily via search engines, so customers know we exist. We have a webshop so that they can buy our products. We have a computer to put those orders into, and the customer can get in touch in various ways - looking good, eh?
Clearly we would not be giving you any of this mail order management advice if we did not hope that you would then be choosing our TOPS software to run your mail order business! As our owner says:
Big-hearted I certainly am, but I am also a businesswoman - my husband keeps on reminding me! Of course I have spent eight years using the software which was built for me and my real business, so I can say very confidently this was designed to be easy to use and takes on board all those little nuances that seemed vital to the running of my successful and very seasonal mail order business. Since we have been providing this mail order management software to other small businesses we have found other 'nuances' that they require, and wherever possible we have taken these ideas on board too.
So I think you should feel confident that this is not some clever piece of software designed by the boffins and forced onto small business owners as 'the way it must be done'! Our TOPS software has been built to specifications selected by other small mail order businesses like you; businesses who do not have time to go on training courses to learn how to use it, who may only be two fingered typists, and who are in business because they like making the goods they sell and do not plan to spend their working day sat in front of a computer. And when business is really busy they want to be able to hire someone to help without having to send them on a training course!
We hope you will enjoy reading the other pages on our site which go into more detail about some of the issues discussed above, and that you view our presentation in order to find our more about how TOPS can simplify mail order management for you.
|
