Doing online business linked with your physical store and/or factory and warehouse should be a profitable endeavor for your business, but managing the online concerns can turn out to be a time-consuming and daunting task.

Fortunately, there are a variety of strategies you may use to help the management of your business online become much less stressful as well as make it more efficient and cost-effective.

Your Fishbowl experts at Brandow Consulting want to share these 5 hot tips to bring down the stress level in your warehouse management and inventory management environment:

Make Your Marketing Strategy Comprehensive.

One way managing a business online can be stressful is that much of your marketing related actions may be spread out in an unmanageable way. If you have to hop from place to place to keep your marketing campaigns organized and updated, your marketing is just that much less effective, and more time-consuming.

Software and apps can help you centralize all your marketing campaigns. A comprehensive marketing strategy will be the result, leaving you and your marketers with more time to plan bigger and better strategies.

Your Online Business Needs Social Media.

Smart business owners use social media sites like Twitter, Instagram and Facebook for their marketing advantages. However, this can be very time-consuming. What to do? If you don’t have the time to do updates, respond to comments and check stats personally, then hire it out. Plus there are several practical analytical tools online that will help you track your sites all in one place.

Keep Your Website User Friendly.

A website that puzzles consumers and irritates clients is worse than useless — it will drive business away. Why spend a minute on an app or platform that isn’t doing your business any good? Don’t take the word of your website engineers that what they’ve given you works fine. Test drive it yourself; better yet, get someone at the office who does not normally use a computer for their work to test out your website. Then you’ll get the real feedback you need to insure your site not only brings in traffic, but captures information and increases your customer satisfaction and customer base.

Inventory and E-Commerce Platforms Must be Integrated.

More and more, if a consumer is not able to use an easy shopping cart app at your e-commerce platform to make instant payments, they will bounce away faster than a flea on a hot griddle. Your sale has gone south and a potential customer is gone for good. Inventory management solutions that integrate smoothly with your chosen e-commerce platform are a must. Customers demand instant information on the availability and shipping details of each of their orders. While protecting their privacy, your payment app must also take into account that no customer every wants to be kept ‘waiting in line’ for more than a few seconds. Your Brandow consultant can help you with the right software to lessen the dangers of outdated inventory quantities and many another data error that could tangle up your delivery process, and weaken customer satisfaction.

Online is Here to Stay. And so are Mobile Devices. Deal with it.

That means, first and foremost, that if you have responsibility for warehouse management and inventory management, you’ve got to realize you can’t do it all online by yourself. That’s not what good online management is about; it’s about delegating and assigning online tasks and then, most importantly, following up on a regular basis to make sure that all tasks and assignments are completed in a timely and efficient manner — and if they’re not, to locate what the bottleneck is and fix it.

Perhaps the most important thing you can do in warehouse and inventory online management is to become well-trained in using a smartphone or other mobile device to check on data and stats. Who do you know that is still carrying around a laptop to keep track of their business? Everyone either has a tablet or an iPhone. You can set your mobile device to give you instant alerts when there’s an inventory or delivery problem, or when stats show alarming variations.

Use your mobile device whenever you need to check on something that’s bothering you, no matter where you are at the time. And then, in order to keep those stress levels down . . .use the OFF button.