Vendor Management System in Malaysia

Today, I have visited couple of “vendor” type boutique around Shah Alam and one in Puchong. Basically, vendor boutique is a boutique where the owner rented the designated spaces to any vendors interested to sell their product at the shop. You may have 60 different brands and companies in one shop and all of them are renting the spaces which generally sized at 1200 – 1600 square feet.

I have observed that there are a lot of opportunities that the vendors’ shop owners can grab and technologies that they can leverage (especially things that I can offer to help), so here are 5 things would complete their Vendor Management System, well at least in Malaysia.

Online E-Commerce System as a marketplace

Since most of the vendors’ shop owners originally sell their products online. They should already have an e-commerce site which should be integrated with online payment gateway like WebCash, iPay88 and Molpay.

And by turning their existing e-commerce site into a marketplace for their vendors, they can:

  1. Offer additional added value service to their vendors – more sales channels. Long term relationship.
  2. Perhaps, earn commission from sales.
  3. Collect and share online database of customers (will be explained more below).
  4. Provide notification system for vendors to be notified of the sales via online channels.
  5. Provide dashboard for vendors for them to know which of their products are currently performing and which aren’t.

The cost to do this is between RM 5,000 – RM 15,000 to make sure it is done properly. And of course, system upgrade is needed to cater the traffic coming to the website.

But the ROI could be unimaginable. This is the 20% effort that could yield 80% results.

So, if you’re a vendor, you might want to suggest your boutique owners to implement this system.

Customer Relationship Management System and Mailing System

A good e-commerce system will come with customer relationship management system. But it depends on how extensive you would like it to be. There are many ways to look at what CRM could do to you, some include:

  • Collect customer information (name, email, phone)
  • Gather information about spending behaviour (how much the spent and how often) – this information will help you to understand them more and push for targeted campaign for these group of spenders.
  • Send periodic marketing campaign seamlessly and better, if you can schedule it AUTOMATICALLY.
  • Monitor the online campaign sent. Which one perform better than the other. And it includes when is the best time to send an email to your customer (time, day, date, week, month). Some call it email marketing, I call it “you should do this already”.

Generally, the cost varies from RM 500 – RM 3,000 per month depending on how large your target group is. Remember, you may collect as many info as you want, but knowing your ideal customer that spend the most money should be your focus.

Inventory Management System

And some new vendors’ boutique owner still manually keep track of the items on their shop which I see counter productive. Some e-commerce system I have built may be extended into having this option. And even alert the marketplace owner (website admin) of which product will be running out soon and which one is out of stock.

And the system is smart enough to suggest to the customer which item is hot and trending which should motivate the boutique owners and vendors.

Other stuff

I would be more than happy to work with boutique owners to get these things aligned and customise their budget for the vendor management system. Things like:

  • SMS Marketing
  • Targeted advertising technique with Facebook and Google Adwords
  • Search Engine Optimisation
  • Branding and PR training
  • Cost optimisation training

are some of the things that I might offer along the way or in the beginning.

So, if you are:

  • vendors’ boutique owners
  • vendors

that would like to know more, you may contact me via:

or fill up the following form:

No strings attached. Free consultation. Coffee is fine 😉

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