Technology is opening up many new opportunities for merchants. New routes to market are being offered by construction supply marketplaces such as Plane & Simple, which recently won a UK Development Award. Whether you are going down the eCommerce route or not, online awareness is still a vital part of modern sales, and it pays to be able to take advantage of as many options as possible.
That’s exactly why we are delighted to announce that we have been working hard on an integration with local marketing experts NearSt – and it’s now ready to roll out to customers with the next system update of Merchanter.
What is NearSt?
NearSt works on a very simple principle: it lets people search local outlets for specific products which are in stock near them.
Predominantly using Google and Facebook search algorithms, it integrates with a seller’s stock list to let potential customers know which items are currently in stock in local branches, avoiding wasted trips and boosting footfall. It’s convenient for customers and can significantly increase footfall and sales to your branches with minimal investment, so it really is a win-win for merchants.
If you’d like to find out more about NearSt, we wrote a blog on it a while back, or check out their website.
Why are we integrating with NearSt?
Merchanter is a cloud-based trading system and, as modern system architecture is designed to do, it integrates well with third party platforms. We already integrate with leading financial platforms like Sage, Xero and QuickBooks, and with eCommerce solutions like Shopify, eBay and WooCommerce. It’s a natural extension to be able to link up with other helpful third parties to give our customers every advantage available to them in such a competitive landscape.
More and more, integration is considered the best model for modern software. Rather than needing one massive, cumbersome system trying to do everything in your business, you have an agile, co-operative system acting as a kind of hub at the operational heart of the business, allowing you to link up with the best solutions to suit your particular needs.
We are continuing to investigate other potential integrations all the time, but if there is a specific platform you’d like your system to hook up with, please do let us know so we can assess the viability.
What else is new?
As a cloud system, we are constantly honing and improving Merchanter for our customers. As well as the inevitable bug-fixes required by every software platform in the world, we are always adding functionality and value to the system. Sometimes these are all-new features, and other times they are refinements or improvements to existing functions.
In this month’s roll-out, for example, we have added:
The ability to allocate lots to mill lines
The option to export end-of-day cashing up reports as excel files, making them much simpler to work with
The capacity to auto-code customers and suppliers
And a whole load more.
We have some other pretty juicy updates lined up for the next few months, including some brilliant advanced customer pricing features and our brilliant new notification centre. All of these are in testing and we’ll be letting you know more in the coming weeks so watch this space.