One of the most challenging aspects of creating and launching an e-commerce site is listing inventory for sale — in part because listing inventory requires that you know your inventory.
Fortunately, this is the area where Arbré Technologies shines. We’ve implemented inventory solutions at numerous businesses just like yours.
Here’s what we’ve found works best when dealing with inventory in advance of a move to e-commerce.
Taking Inventory
RFID tagging is the industry standard for taking and tracking inventory. It’s relatively inexpensive and pays for itself quickly in terms of accuracy of plant count down to the flat level, as well as overall manpower and resource savings.
It also has proven its value on the back end of the operation, with its ability to verify shipping information and ensure each truck leaves at or near capacity.
The Arbré Marketplace solution uses inexpensive, reusable RFID tags. When these tags are read by a handheld, portable reader, they can give accurate inventory counts down to the flat level — and inventory can be taken as quickly as you can move up and down the rows of your operation, whether on foot or on a golf cart.
Of course, inventory counts are just the start. That inventory data needs to flow into your computer system in such a way that you can not only access it but dissect it.
Fortunately, Arbré Marketplace works with most major database and analysis systems, and the Arbré team is skilled at getting multiple systems to “talk “ with each other, so you can not only collect the data but see it and use it in whatever ways make sense for your business.
Accurate inventory has so many more uses outside of e-commerce. Inventory counts are vital for tax and accounting purposes, wholesaling, ordering, and so much more.
In fact, you could make a case that in the course of implementing an RFID-based inventory platform, e-commerce is just the icing on the cake. The cake is accurate inventory counts and usable data, collected more quickly with fewer resources.
Listing Your Inventory For Sale
It’s easy to move from taking inventory to listing inventory for sale … if you have a platform that can take your inventory and translate it into a web-ready site, complete with stock images of your inventory.
Easy, sure – but who has all that?
Actually, Clarity Connect does.
The Clarity Connect platform has data for virtually every type of plant that might be sold commercially in the United States. And by data, we mean heartiness, growing zones, height, biannual vs. annual vs. perennial, diameter, color, sun-and-shade tolerance — everything.
In addition, it has high-quality images of all these plants. And finally, it has ready-made, high-quality web templates that can take inventory data and create pages and pages of inventory for sale, attractively presented and customer-ready.
This is an out-of-the-box solution that is anything but cookie-cutter — and it’s specifically designed for horticulture businesses that want to get into e-commerce.
To summarize, the Arbré Marketplace RFID-based inventory platform generates detailed information on plant types and counts. That data feeds automatically into the Clarity Connect web platform, which displays available inventory for sale and can delete sold-out varieties on a near-real-time basis, so customers always can see just what you have for sale at any given time.
We have the complete rundown how a combination of Arbré Technologies’ inventory expertise and Clarity Connect’s marketing platform can get you from inventory to e-commerce faster than you ever thought possible.