Whilst shopping carts and ecommerce marketplaces primarily focus on helping you to manage a catalog of products and to create pages for product listings, multi channel ecommerce platforms on the other hand help you to integrate, link and control multiple online sales channels from one centralized dashboard.
Managing sales in your shopping carts and marketplace accounts can be laborious and time consuming especially if you manage multiple accounts and sales channels which let’s face it IS necessary if you want to reach as many buyers as possible and advertise in as many places as possible.
Multichannel ecommerce ERP systems like Multi Channel Works helps you to control all aspects of your online ecommerce business and streamline back end order processing, shipping and inventory management.
Here’s a few definitions we use that help explain the terms..
What is Multi Channel? (relative to online retail)
Multi Channel eCommerce refers to using multiple online points of sale to advertise and syndicate products for maximum exposure and strategical product placement. Integrated sales channels can include marketplaces like eBay, Amazon, Rakuten and others including your own shopping carts.
Source: http://MultiChannelWorks.com
What’s an ERP?
Enterprise resource planning (ERP) is business process management software that allows an organization to use a system of integrated applications to manage the business and automate many back office functions related to technology, services and human resources.
Source: http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/E/ERP.html
What is eCommerce?
Electronic commerce, commonly written as e-commerce, is the trading in products or services using computer networks, such as the Internet. Electronic commerce draws on technologies such as mobile commerce, electronic funds transfer, supply chain management, Internet marketing,online transaction processing, electronic data interchange (EDI), inventory management systems, and automated data collection systems.
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-commerce
Its when you combine multi channel marketing with ecommerce and an advanced ERP system specifically designed and built from the ground up for managing multi channel ecommerce that matures into an advanced system being MultiChannelWorks.
