Software packages for online businesses come in all manner of shapes and sizes, though web based stock control systems and custom management software can be integrated easily into an existing business making it an excellent choice for small businesses that need to retain stock and manage it effectively.  Benefits of such a flexible system compare hugely to older more sluggish systems.

Functions

To ensure that all business processes do flow, generally there are features that a developer would recommend so that the whole system is adapted to your business.

Particularly impressive functions that can be adapted to suit are those such as stock level management – assisting and recording levels of stock and reordering when the minimum stock has been reached; immediate reporting capabilities on all aspects of stock, auditing and management; the ability to generate statistics and factual real-time reports.

Drawbacks

It is quite easy to sell new software and note it as the next best thing, however one thing to realise when researching and budgeting for a new integrated piece of software is that it may not be able to handle some parts of your business technology and it is worth budgeting extra in order to be able to deal with any issues that may require further technical assistance.

Benefits

Including system options such as stock control and management, inventory, auto ordering etc, opting for a stock control system that is from a web based application can have a huge number of additional benefits, like greater financial rewards and faster report procedures.

Whilst being easy to use and introduce colleagues to, newer systems can be faster and more intelligent ( i.e. having more uses and using less time to conduct tasks ) therefore more versatile for smaller businesses.

In short, whilst it's worth remembering that although nto always the case most web based solutions and can be integrated into current systems, not all of those will be able to work together so factoring enough extra in your budget to cover any unforeseen challenges whilst installing the software is important.

This year small to medium sized businesses have been totally focused on The Cloud – a web based, or web hosted, inventory management service that can be used to run a professional online business if it has a need to retain stock or has a warehousing and distribution centre.

Software under the cloud is allowing online business a way of utilizing an online service which assist with recording customer sales orders, maintaining stock levels and adjusting upon order receipts, creating purchase orders and is capable of producing detailed reporting of income, inventory and customer data whilst being able to handle multi-users. 

We mentioned in our ‘Software as a Service Introduction' that service under the cloud offers ecommerce business much more flexibility, and this is indeed true, and the software can often just sync, or integrate, with current business systems ( of course, this is not a guaranteed integration and should be discussed in more detail with your developer ). 

Frankly, software under the cloud is providing businesses with a fast way of running an online business in a professional manner, therefore offering business intelligence to smaller companies that would not perhaps have the budget, or want to spend thousands of pounds, to pay for a larger system that replaces an old one.

Other Names for The Cloud Software

It is easy to confuse the names for this software – even we use different names to cover this, you will see us use ‘Software as a Service' or ‘SaaS', however below are just a few names that you can find on the web relating to very similar applications:

Analytics as a Service

Performance on Demand

Intelligence on Demand

Platform as a Service

Cloud based data warehousing

The list goes on, however the applications themselves do vary slightly.  When researching for your software, a first port of call will be your developer who should be able to recommend the best pieces of software, explain the ease of integration into your existing business and of course can suggest ways of introducing it.