Leader Stores gains the insight needed to lead the way in homewares, flooring and lighting

The background

Leader Stores is a true multichannel retailer, selling via three Visualsoft webstores, a showroom in Hartlepool and via eBay and Amazon marketplaces. With an enormous range of products covering 92 brands, all ranging from traditional to contemporary designs, Leader Stores is known for helping their customers turn a house into a home – at unbeatable prices.

Leader Stores has created three different webstores to reflect the array of products it offers online. To manage multiple websites that attract thousands of visitors daily and thousands of orders monthly, Leader Stores needed to partner with a retail operations software provider and decided to go with Brightpearl.

We caught up with Gary Murray, Ecommerce Manager at Leader Stores, to find out more about how they’ve grown their operation into a successful business.

The challenge

Selling across multiple channels means things can get complicated when it comes to what inventory you have allocated for which channel – especially if it’s not all managed from one central place. Leader were using an out-of-date POS system that wasn’t capable of keeping up with the fast pace of their online business, where they needed to track and update sales channels to ensure everything was accurate.

Gary told us: “When you’re not sure what’s being sold, where and if you’re even making a profit on sales, it leaves you running your business in the dark, which is what we did for over 6 months until we found Brightpearl. The POS system we were using before became incredibly outdated and almost impossible to manage.”

Murray recalls: “Before Brightpearl, we were physically having to check what stock we had in the warehouse and sometimes things simply didn’t add up. Pricing was also a tedious task – to update prices across all of our sales channels meant someone having to go in and manually update each channel one by one. It just wasn’t an efficient process.”

Key Challenges:

• Selling products too cheaply

• Lacked data to make informed decisions

• Manual data entry across multiple platforms

The solution

Customers nowadays shop around to find the best deals and prices – and being able to quote competitive prices is a deal maker. Murray says: “With Brightpearl, we can accurately see profit margins down to the order level so we can discount where possible to offer the best prices. Brightpearl’s analytics give us the ability to create customizable reports that deliver the insights we need to make performance-driven business decisions right down to the product level.”

“We now only stock products which make business sense. We’ve cut down the amount of products we stock saving us warehouse space, and we can easily raise POs within Brightpearl when stock is getting low,” continues Murray. “We’ve also been able to optimize our shipping costs – we’re now offering appealing prices with the ability to ship further away to destinations like Scotland at a much better price for the customer.”

Murray also says: “Repricing products is easy with Brightpearl and we no longer have to physically check what’s in stock as we can see everything at a click of a button. We’re saving a huge amount of time, about 35 hours per month, as Brightpearl has streamlined our processes allowing us to focus on optimizing and growing the business.”

“Customer service has improved now too. We use Brightpearl CRM to make sure we never let a customer down. You can see a customer’s entire purchase history in one record and it’s easy to schedule tasks and callbacks so nothing gets missed,” adds Gary.

The future

Leader Stores have ambitious plans for the future. Gary tells us: “We’re looking to double our revenue with the help of Brightpearl. We have the clarity now to make smarter purchasing and pricing decisions. I’m excited to grow our business even further; we might even consider opening up another webstore and expanding our product range in the near future.”

All the Leader websites:
www.leaderstores.co.uk
www.leaderdoors.co.uk
www.leaderfloors.co.uk