Resources for retailers: 23 retail tools to know

If you’re an independent retailer, it can feel like you have to be good at everything. You need to be a great accountant, a logistics whiz, a savvy marketer, and even a graphic designer. That can get overwhelming very quickly—luckily, there are plenty of resources for retailers, including software, tools, and publications, to help you get essential tasks done.

Resources for retailers

Can you start a retail store without any tools? Not really—the lemonade stand on the corner might be the only exception. Retailers require a handful of essential tools such as accounting services, POS software, and inventory management at a minimum. Once retail stores begin to grow, the amount of tools a retail store may require grows along with the business and can include tools and software made to help with marketing, sales, and human resources. 

Let’s walk through some of the most popular tools that a retailer might enlist in their workflow.

Retailer essential tools 

POS

A point-of-sale system, or POS, is an essential tool for all retailers and helps facilitate the process of sales and transactions with customers. Most commonly, retailers install a POS terminal at their check-out counter. 

Accounting

Understanding your finances and accounts is an important aspect of running a successful retail store. When looking for accounting software, ensure that it integrates with your POS system; otherwise, you’ll be jumping through unnecessary hoops to bundle all of your data.

Inventory management 

Do you know how many items you currently have in stock? Utilizing inventory management software allows retailers to quickly gauge how much inventory they have, how much they need, and how much they have sold. Understanding your inventory also comes with a handful of benefits, including improved profit margins, spoilage prevention, and minimization of out-of-stocks. 

E-commerce retailer essentials 

Along with the three tools noted above, e-commerce retailers need two more additional tools to help make their store successful.

E-commerce platform

You can’t have an e-commerce retail store without a website! An e-commerce platform is software that is built specifically for selling goods and services online. Shopify is considered an all-in-one e-commerce platform due to its robust selection of built-in tools and integrations. 

Analytics 

Unlike a brick-and-mortar retail store where you can physically see and interact with your customers, e-commerce businesses need to utilize analytics to understand their customers and their customer journey (i.e., how the customer landed on the page). Google Analytics is the most widely used, but there are countless other applications and software that can provide insightful analytics and data. 

Additional retailer tools 

Here, we’ve compiled some of our favorite resources for retailers. You can boost productivity, automate manual tasks, and give yourself a competitive edge. See which ones might be a fit for your business, and be sure to check back as we add more resources!

Marketing

Canva

For the retailer on a budget who can’t hire a freelance designer, Canva can be an incredible resource. At a low cost, you can craft creative assets for your business from its thousands of available branding templates. The app has a simple drag-and-drop interface that allows users to whip up social media graphics, website landing pages, flyers, presentations, business cards, and downloadable e-books. Even if you have no design experience, you’re empowered to create beautiful content faster.

Why it stands out: Its “teams” feature allows you and other partners in your business to collaborate on designs together. If you want to share a design with someone for feedback, you can create a shareable link where they can make edits in the file.

Attentive

Email marketing can be an effective tool for engaging customers, but more and more businesses are bypassing the clutter of people’s inboxes and going straight to their phones with SMS marketing. Text messages enjoy a higher open rate and more engagement than traditional email, and SMS can be a stronger way to connect with younger customers who prefer them over email communication. Attentive is a popular software that allows you to personalize and automate SMS marketing for your brand. 

Why it stands out: Attentive’s detailed dashboards and helpful visualizations allow you to easily track customer behavior over time and make data-driven decisions. You can build reports within minutes and create A/B tests to discover more about your shoppers. 

Design.com’s Logo Maker

Designing the perfect logo for your business can be an overwhelming task. A logo plays a vital role in every brand, sharing the brand identity in a quick and digestible illustration. Design.com understands the importance of an outstanding logo and its Logo Maker helps start-ups, businesses, and entrepreneurs find and create their perfect logo in minutes.

Why it stands out: Design.com showcases popular industries such as food and fashion to help businesses find the best logo for their brand with thousands of design choices.

PIM

Pimberly

Product Information Management software like Pimberly makes it easy to manage and process required data retailers need for marketing and selling products. The software utilizes AI to eliminate manual tasks as well as allows the user to leverage data-based insights to inform product decisions and stay positioned over the competition.

Why it stands out: Pimberly’s PIM management goes beyond just data centralization. It delves into data optimization and enrichment to help retailers grow their business.

CRM

Klaviyo

Abandoned carts are something retailers want to avoid. But when a shopper has shown enough interest in your product to add it to their cart, that’s a positive sign. Sometimes they just need a small nudge to complete the purchase. Klaviyo can automate the sending of reminder emails to those shoppers about the item they forgot in their cart. It keeps your product top of mind for them even if the shopper has left your page.

Why it stands out: The high level of customization within Klaviyo means you can send personalized emails to different segments of your audience. If they’re a repeat customer, an unengaged shopper, a certain demographic, or in a certain location, you can create separate email lists to better connect with them. 

ReConvert

With acquisition costs on the rise, it’s important to maximize the value of every order. ReConvert empowers Shopify and Wix-based retailers to easily add upsells to their stores. Add powerful checkout upsells, one-click upsells, and thank-you page offers. ReConvert is trusted by over 40,000 sellers each month who use it to add up to 15% to their overall revenue. Optimizing your post-purchase funnel is an easy win that every retailer needs to do.

Why it stands out: ReConvert was built by a team of former e-commerce retailers. With single-click activation, auto-sync branding, and pre-built conversion templates, ReConvert makes it as easy as possible to increase your average order value.

Inventory management

Syncware

Processing orders can be one of the most time-consuming aspects of running a retail business. But it doesn’t have to be. If you’re still manually entering order data or paying someone to do it, check out Syncware. This integration takes a tedious but important task and automates it by connecting all of your order sources into one platform. No more toggling between different systems; you can see all of your order data at a glance from a single dashboard. It’s a game changer for growing, multichannel businesses. 

Why it stands out: From QuickBooks to NetSuite to ShipStation, the Syncware app can be linked to more than 300 different integrations. If it’s used for online retail, you’ll likely be able to find it and link it.

Extensiv Integration Manager

Formerly known as CartRover, Extensiv Integration Manager not only automates your entire order flow (eliminating hours of data entry) but also loads that data into your shipping software—seamlessly fusing together multiple processes and streamlining them from start to finish. The major benefit is the total visibility you get. Each time an order is placed and successfully shipped from your warehouse, your inventory is automatically updated on all your order sources.

Why it stands out: Each of its subscription tiers gets you unlimited order volume, meaning customers pay the same regardless of how many orders you process. You don’t have to worry about this cost fluctuating because you had a really good month.

Trunk

Inventory management can get really messy really fast without the right tools. With Trunk, you could save hours of time each week, and you won’t have to worry about overselling an item or running out of stock due to inventory mismanagement. Trunk does real-time syncing of all of your sales channels from Faire to Shopify to Etsy and more. After connecting all of your sales channels to the app, Trunk automatically builds its own centralized inventory. 

Why it stands out: What’s best about Trunk is its scalability. It doesn’t matter whether you have a dozen SKUs or several hundred SKUs; Trunk can grow with you as your business grows. Its intuitive interface ensures you’ll always know what products are on hand.

ShipNerd

This aptly named integration promises to make your shipping processes more streamlined and affordable. Fulfillment and shipping can be a cost sink for any business, and ShipNerd helps to take some of the guesswork out of it. The cloud-based platform allows you to compare rates and delivery times from the most popular couriers such as UPS and DHL to get you the best deal. From its user-friendly dashboard, you can track shipments, schedule pickups, and print shipping labels. 

Why it stands out: ShipNerd offers volume discounts so the more you use the shipping software, the more you can save. However, there are no volume commitments for using the software, so you pay for only what you ship. 

Shipmate Fulfillment

Shipmate Fulfillment focuses on what it does best: fulfillment and distribution. This Philadelphia-based fulfillment company has been providing full-service LTL/FTL distribution, parcel fulfillment, and kitting and bundling for the last 30 years for businesses in the Northeast and mid-Atlantic regions.

Why it stands out: Shipmate Fulfillment boasts 300,000 square feet of warehouse space to hold thousands of palletized loads, making it easier for businesses to store their wholesale inventory.

Sellbery

Sellbery is an innovative multichannel e-commerce platform designed to simplify and streamline the way online businesses manage their product listings, inventory, and orders across various marketplaces. With a focus on helping sellers maximize their online presence, Sellbery automates the synchronization of products, orders, and stock levels, ensuring accurate representation of your business on platforms such as Amazon, eBay, Shopify, and more.

Why it stands out: Sellbery equips businesses with powerful analytics to make data-driven decisions, improving sales performance and operational efficiency.

News

National Retail Federation

Data lovers, this one’s for you. The National Retail Federation has existed for more than a century and is the world’s largest retail trade association. It’s well-known for its massive conference that attracts tens of thousands each year, and the organization’s original research and reports are some of the most trusted in the industry. 

Why it stands out: NRF’s annual State of Retail report is full of data, statistics, and helpful visualizations that will help you understand where the retail industry is and where it’s headed next. 

Retail Dive

If you’re curious about the world of retail at large, then Retail Dive is for you with its in-depth journalism about the current trends shaping the face of retail. From e-commerce to brick-and-mortar and from megastores to independent retailers, this publication takes readers across countless industries. You can easily get a bird’s-eye view of what’s impacting retail and why.

Why it stands out: Its daily newsletter is one of the most robust and informative in the biz. You’ll have all of the retail industry’s top news expertly curated and sent straight to your inbox.

EntreResource

Knowledge is power, especially when the world of e-commerce is constantly evolving. EntreResource provides helpful blog posts and newsletters for those looking for additional internet business tips and tactics such as affiliate marketing, outsourcing talent, digital marketing, and side hustles.

Why it stands out: EntreResource provides in-depth reviews of SaaS products that e-commerce brands may be interested in purchasing.

Marketplace 

Faire

When it comes to the discovery of new products, Faire is a powerful connector, bringing independent retailers closer to wholesalers that are interested in working with their store. Through Faire, brands and buyers are brought together in one simple, easy-to-navigate wholesale marketplace. Retailers can find unique, handcrafted products that they wouldn’t come across in any big-box store. Faire’s powerful search function also means you can find relevant items quickly that are a match for your brand.

Why it stands out: Faire offers net-60 payment terms for retailers so they can buy products without having to pay for them right away. This can be a necessity for smaller retailers who need constant cash flow to cover fixed costs like rent and payroll. Plus, Faire integrates with many of the other retail tools on this list!

eWorldTrade

eWorldtrade is a comprehensive B2B marketplace having over 10 years of expertise in digital branding and web development. The B2B Marketplace currently caters over 7,000,000 registered users and briskly expanding its database of manufacturers, suppliers and companies from all over the world. 

Why it stands out: The organization is focused in overcoming all B2B marketplace challenges and loop holes relentlessly, introducing trading transparency and utmost quality.

Financial 

QuickBooks

A popular go-to for small businesses, QuickBooks is a nimble and scalable accounting software that’s been around for more than 40 years. Once you link your bank and credit card accounts, it downloads all transactions so that you can see your expenses and sales at a glance. From there, you can customize invoices, calculate sales tax, and enter receipts or bills. It streamlines recordkeeping and inventory management.

Why it stands out: Since QuickBooks has been the industry standard for so long, there’s a robust ecosystem of support, expertise, and resources. The company also has its own network of certified accountants and bookkeepers as well as community forums and free tutorials. 

Clover

Whether you’re taking payments in person or online, you’ll need a point-of-sale system, or POS, to process those payments quickly and easily. Clover is just one of many POS systems you can use. It offers card readers and other devices that can take credit card payments anywhere. All purchases are synced with Clover’s cloud-based software, and then you can track payments and refunds in Clover’s dashboard. 

Why it stands out: You can sell digital or physical gift cards through its platform, empowering you to drive customer loyalty or boost retention. Gift cards can be a big revenue driver for small businesses as people often spend over the amount on their gift card.

Minderest

Setting the right price for your products is always a challenge. Price too high, and you lose the sale. Price too low, and you lose your margin. Minderest lets you monitor prices from anywhere, including Amazon and Google Shopping, to ensure that your prices are right where you want them.

Why it stands out: Minderest’s solution collects data from any online retailer’s prices, promotions, catalog, and inventory. This gives you the intelligence you need to make smart decisions about your inventory and pricing policies.

Organization

Alloy

This app allows you to connect tasks between other online services from Google Drive to DocuSign to Asana to Salesforce. As your business grows, you’ll likely encounter something that’s called “tech stack creep,” which is when you keep on increasing the number of tools and programs you use to do your work. This can cause redundancy or needless complexity if those tools aren’t working together in the right way. Alloy helps to rein in this creep by aggregating most of the tools you use into a single dashboard that you can proactively manage. 

Why it stands out: Alloy’s list of e-commerce integrations is always growing. And if you don’t see an integration that you need for your retail business, there’s an option to request that they build it for you.

Product

Audaces360

Design, create, and manage your wholesale fashion products with Audaces360, an innovative concept that integrates productive and creative steps to make your fashion collection successful. From product concepts to optimized fittings and pre-cost integration, Audaces is the perfect solution for creating new fashion patterns and designs.

Why it stands out: Audaces Supera, which is included in the 360 bundle, utilizes AI to reduce time and waste by ensuring the fabric is cut with the least amount of waste. 

Syncee

Finding unique, premium drop-shipping products to sell in an online store with fast shipping might be one of the biggest challenges for a retailer. That’s where Syncee comes in. Syncee is a B2B marketplace helping retailers and suppliers connect in the US, California, and everywhere in the world. A wide range of products and brands are waiting to fulfill the orders an online store receives. Syncee’s powerful tools help business owners to add and update products in their store in a simple way. Edit products, customize retail prices, and access everything your store needs in one place.

Why it stands out: Syncee offers millions of curated and ready-to-sell products in a wide range of categories. No inventory risk, no minimum orders needed. Automate product uploads and updates, and order synchronization.