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Effective group ordering solution

Effective Uniform Group Ordering Solution to win large uniform contracts

8 min read
Jason February 22, 2021

Most of today’s working people have the freedom to go to work in casual attire, however, according to recent stats, over 55% of the world’s working population wear uniforms to work.

This makes it clear that a majority of companies in the world require workwear or uniforms. This also provides uniform businesses a huge opportunity to acquire contracts of such large accounts.

That being said, like in any industry, this field also has huge competition with numerous businesses vying with each other to grab a company’s uniform contract.

In such competitive circumstances, you need a unique offering as part of your arsenal. In this article, we will explain an effective uniform group ordering solution to win uniform contracts of multiple companies.

If you’re wondering, the short answer is to have ‘Preferred Groups’ functionality on your online uniform store. Here’s everything you need to know about it.

What is a Preferred Group?

Preferred Groups are a ‘store-within-a-store’ functionality that allows you to create a unique and personalized group shopping experience for your specific or preferred customers.

Simply put, you will be able to provide your customers a concierge-level experience in buying their uniforms.

For example, if you provide uniforms to a specific hospital or the employees of a security company, you could provide the employees of that organization an option to log in from the main website and be taken to their own specific page welcomed with their company's branding, offers, and of course, uniforms and accessories that are specific to their organization.

Let’s look at some of its benefits before jumping into its requirements.

Benefits

  1. Allows you to provide a personalized and unique experience to different customers based on their business requirements.
  2. Provide customers a private and secure shopping experience.
  3. Customize pricing, product availability, and offers in a way that they can be viewed by only a specific customer.
  4. Enhances the uniform buying experience while simplifying the process.

Requirements of uniform group ordering

To be able to approach companies for uniform contracts through group orders, you need some essential features in your uniform store or an eCommerce platform to attract them. They are:

Password protection
One of the most vital features of group order is the option for employees to log in to a private store that is protected with a password.

This ensures only those employees who are supposed to have entry will be able to gain access.

For this, you need an eCommerce platform that has the fastest performance & security with CDN, Web Application Firewall, Load Balancer, Smart Routing, and SSL in the event of a DDOS attack.

We did exactly that to one of our customers, Classic Custom Uniforms. We built them a private store functionality and enabled private log-in to their customers.

Store within a store
A store-within-a-store functionality is a defining feature for group orders. It must be available in your eCommerce store in order to go after companies for uniform contracts.

It essentially provides a separate store to each of your customers, wherein their customers can log in and view only those uniforms, pricing, offers, and embroidery options that are specific to their organization.

Multiple payment methods
Providing your customers different tender types is very important in group orders.

Most companies have a fixed type of payment method or a combination of two or more payment methods they would want their employees to use during checkout.

Some of the payment method combinations maybe a company pay and credit card, or payroll deduct and allowance, and many more options.

The type of payment may also vary from employee to employee. Your uniform store must be capable of providing such flexible functionality while catering to group orders.

Multiple shipping options
Similar to having multiple payment options, it is also important for your platform to support multiple shipping options.

You may provide group orders to the same company, but their employees may be located at different branches or locations.

Some of the shipping options are single location shipping, multiple location shipping, employee defined locations, and others.

Personalization options
While having personalization options like embroidery in your online store might be optional, providing employees or your customers this added functionality to personalize their uniforms before a purchase is a much-needed option you might want to consider.

Especially if you are looking to stand out in the sea of uniform providers.

It’s also an effective way to boost your uniform sales by 20%.

One administrative portal
When you handle multiple organizations and stores with different requirements, it can be cumbersome to manage all the stores through multiple portals.

The solution to this is to have just one admin portal to manage all the stores with ease.

Your platform must support a single admin functionality that allows you to seamlessly manage multiple groups as well as launch new stores on the fly.

Now, Preferred Groups or having the functionality to provide group orders in your online uniform store is an effective option if you are looking to provide a unique and customized shopping experience to your customers with a decent number of requirements.

But if you’re wondering how to provide uniforms to large organizations with complex rules, restrictions, and requirements, like airlines, for instance, we have a solution for that too.

It’s called Uniform Programs.

Now that you understand how you can empower your uniform business to win uniform contracts of large accounts, you might want to have this functionality on your web store too.

Contact us, to discuss that and more of your uniform business requirements.

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