In this episode of Add To Cart, we are joined by Andrew Maver, Co founder and CEO of stockinstore, an omni-channel SAAS platform connecting online and physical stores. With clients such as Adair’s, Kookai, Price Attack and Scanlan Theodore, stockinstore allows customers to find store locations, check product levels and lots more, creating more integrated, convenient shopping experiences. In this chat Andrew shares his thoughts on the product categories hardest to keep track of, what tips he has for staying on top of stock and how growing up as a long distance swimmer has helped him build a technology business.
“Truth be told there were times along the way when we struggled…we were going to pull the pin“
Andrew Maver
Origins
“It just felt completely foreign to us that retailers weren’t actually showing what was available in their physical stores. And so they would have customers…and I explain this to a lot of our clients…they go to the effort of designing, manufacturing, importing, getting it into their physical stores, training their staff up, getting it into their systems, putting it on their website advertising and marketing it.
And then they don’t actually tell the customers exactly what store to actually get it from. So for us, that was the principle behind starting stockinstore and the find in store solution.”
Competitive advantage
“So, we’ve added in some solutions like store locator. we’ve built that out of a request from, our clients really. we have this thing called a special trading hours module that’s there that controls for public holidays and things like that, the retailers can change their, trading hours. And we wanted to be able to show the customer when the store was actually open, and to make it really easy for them to manage it.
So retailers were coming to us saying “You’ve got better store information than we do on our stores page, and it’s easy to update it. So can you actually build a store locator?” So we built that for them. And then we’ve done things like Google local inventory advertising.
So we’re big believers that, for omnichannel retailers, those have got bricks and mortar and online, that is really important for them to be able to leverage their stores as a competitive advantage against the pure plays.”
Rolling stock takes
“One of the practices that we do talk about with our clients is actually about having rolling stock takes. So stock taking parts of their store frequently and getting into a good practice of doing it. I think that’s really important, especially when you are an omnichannel retailer and you’re surfacing. Not just surfacing, but you’re actually making available for sale stock that’s actually in a physical store.
I think we’ll see some changes that will happen and there’ll be some shifts that will come in the next 12 to 18, 24 months that’ll make it even more important from that regard. But I think that rolling stock take and a really good method for doing stock takes, fundamentally that’s the key to it.”
Questions answered in this episode include…
- How does stockinstore impact the customer experience?
- Which product categories do you think are the toughest to keep track of?
- Which emerging omnichannel features do you think will soon become the norm?
Links from the episode:
- stockinstore
- Adairs
- Kookai
- Bunnings
- The Body Shop
- Aesop
- Toyworld
- July
- Shopify Plus and W Titley & Co (sponsored)
- Packleo (sponsored)
This episode was brought to you by…
