– – –

What if every time you checked out at the supermarket, the cashier had to log all of your shopping cart contents, look up the price for each item in a binder, update the list of items remaining in the store, and then tally your bill by hand.

Would you even go back to the store? The checkout line would snake through the aisles, extend outside, and wrap around the block. Customers would waste hours waiting in line while the supermarket would squander valuable resources trying to execute processes such as this.

Ok, this is a little extreme, but you get the picture. Managing an online store is not much different. Even with all of our technology, cumbersome and inefficient manual processes continue to plague the retail and E-commerce industries, and specifically their inventory management systems. Importing products from a single warehouse, let alone several, is a time-consuming task.

Read more…