There are roughly 150K sellers actively selling through the HKTV mall marketplace. 15% of them sell at least $5M a year and more than 5% sell more than $10M. That means there are almost 15K unique sellers that manage complex, high-volume businesses with the HKTVMall as a gateway to their customers. These companies often rely on a mix of business software to help them handle their operations, ranging from simple accounting or shipping apps to more complex ERP systems.
But wait, what is ERP software?
ERP is Enterprise Resource Planning. It is an umbrella term for a very complex type of business management software, but simply put, it houses an abundance of functions that help run your business from accounting, purchase, sales to inventory management and manufacturing to supply chain management.
What could an HKTVMall seller need an ERP system for?
1. ERP can help you stop losing sales. How?
HKTVMall is very rigid about managing product listings. Each SKU or ASIN that you list can have dozens if not hundreds of small informational requirements in order to remain valid. If you have more than a few products listed, managing the complexity in Seller Central can lead to errors that could get your product delisted. An ERP system’s product management functionality can prevent errors that would see your products removed from the eyes of HKTVMall 's 3 million members.
What’s more, if you are an HKTVMall seller and your product has insufficient stock in the fulfillment warehouses, you will lose sales even if a buyer wants your product. Keeping track of the demand in HKTVmall marketplaces and creating the shipping plans to get your products to each of them is not easy. Inventory management is a core element of ERP, as are the logistics tools needed to manage your shipping to HKTVMall fulfillment centers.
2. ERP can help you figure out if you are actually making money and whether that money is getting to you on time. How?
Determining profitability is hard to do in any business. Calculating per product Gross Profit is usually tough enough, even with the simple formula of ‘Sales Price – (Product Cost + Cost of Delivery)’. Net profit is even harder when you have to take into account rent, utilities, and other things. Accounting systems are supposed to do this for us but are critically limited by what information they have access to.
ERP software is designed to receive and manage all costs and connect them to sales so you can easily figure out your Gross Profit per product. It can also factor in all your other business costs, like wages and overheads.
HKTVMall produces a Settlement Report to help you know what has been sold, for how much and whether anything has been returned through Seller Central. Unfortunately, it is a bit opaque when trying to connect it to the flow of sales orders coming in though. Reconciliation is extremely time-consuming and tedious but an ERP can store this data and even take care of this process for you.
3. ERP can not only help you plan what to do next but also execute those plans.
With all the information an ERP collects, the data can be used to determine what markets and products you should be planning to promote in the future. There are analytics tools that can make great use of everything an ERP collects.
In addition, ERP sometimes includes automation tools. Based on configured sets of criteria, an ERP can be set up to issue purchase orders to your vendors, and project cash requirements to fulfill orders.
So… do HKTVMall sellers need ERP systems?
The summarized answer is that if you have enough complexity in your business that you are losing opportunities, then an ERP can help. However, if you are not feeling pressed by operational concerns, then it is not necessary.
We have been watching our customers struggle with all and more of the aforementioned problems. That’s why we are building a connection between our ERP software and HKTVMall platform. Our system shall seamlessly connects to the HKTVMall seller’s Seller Central and acts as a powerful but easy to use full-featured back-office tool. It’ll handle tasks such as inventory management, multi-marketplace needs, accounting, procurement back to supplier and shipping plans, just to name a few. If you are curious, we’d welcome you to contact us for more detail.