Thompsons

Tal Sanga, eCommerce Manager, Thompsons Ltd: “We had a system on our website for controlling our stock, but it didn’t work for Amazon and eBay, which was was a long manual process. One person would go around the warehouse and check the stock levels for all our items. Once the stock got down to 10 or 15, he’d check more regularly and inform another person who was responsible for the eBay site. Then the eBay person would manually adjust the stock level.

“We needed a system to auto-update our platforms with the correct information. We considered a range of options and went with the Volo system and its people. Our website and our Amazon and eBay presences are all run centrally on the Volo platform. On our regular update call our Customer Success Manager pointed to the growth potential we have on Amazon and we’re already seeing the results of that advice. “It was quite a challenge to move basically over 50 years of SKU data and history over to the new system. The implementation process worked really well, however, and we’re always refining and weeding our data whenever we can.”

“Pretty much everyone involved in the business uses the Volo system, for different reasons. Our retail shop, me, the warehouse, customer service; we all use it. The control and consolidation of stock is a huge benefit to us. There are instant, automatic updates across all the channels and we still like to do do a manual stock check once a month.

“The Volo listing ability is far better than having to list manually on the specific channels. You used to have to do uploads in batches of 500, hope that the marketplace system wouldn’t crash or fail and you’d have to start again, that kind of thing. With the Volo system can easily do bulk imports and updates. We create listings, optimise them, send them across the channels and we’re done. It saves a massive amount of time for me. I certainly wouldn’t be in the position I am now without it.

“I’m a big user of the reporting for lots of reasons. I can analyse our sales by supplier, or in other ways, across any time frame I like, and make re-order decisions accordingly. It makes a world of difference. I can look in depth at particular slow sellers or non-moving items, and adjust the pricing or listing based on this information. We can also run our own software against the Volo API. We can take data, manipulate it and feed it back into the Volo system. We’ve got lots of flexibility that way.”

“In summary, we‘ve been using the Volo platform and Volo Vision reporting module for over three years and during this time we’ve more than doubled our business. As I mentioned, with our previous system, we were only able to control the stock on our website, but we had to adjust it manually for other channels such as Amazon or eBay. Managing all channels and listings can be daunting, but working with the Volo system and people is like having five members of staff in one platform.

“Now, everything is automated, we have full control of our stock, and all the results are easily accessible in one dashboard. We can quickly identify the less popular products, check the market and the competition and then adjust our strategy accordingly. The Volo system offers us great flexibility and helps us make better business decisions with agility.”