8 min read
If you’re in the uniform industry and are partially or fully capable of providing uniforms to companies or run full-fledged employee uniform programs, you need to read this article.
Given our years of expertise in providing eCommerce solutions to many prominent names in the uniform industry, we can confidently say that there is one defining factor that will set you apart from your competitors in winning more uniform contracts and bids from both small and large organizations.
But how? The short answer is a feature-rich eCommerce store that is capable of fulfilling the unique and complex uniform requirements of any organization.
Running an employee uniform program can be equally as challenging as it is demanding. For example, you may provide uniforms to the Hospital, Airlines, and Public Safety sectors, but each of their uniform requirements may completely differ from one another.
Naturally, this calls for an eCommerce solution that is flexible enough to meet all the unique requirements of these industries and more.
Let’s look at some of the most common challenges of running a uniform program:
As mentioned above, each industry may have a different business rule or requirement that is unique to them.
Your eCommerce platform must be flexible enough to satisfy their respective business requirements.
For example, the Hospital industry might have a requirement to assign different colored scrubs to specific departments. The Public Safety industry requires hierarchical approval options. The Industrial/FR sector requires bulk ordering with a supervisor ordering capability, and the Corporate industry may require employee quotas to control budgets.
Your eCommerce platform must provide you the above functionality and more in order to satisfy the unique uniform program functionalities each industry demands.
Having an eCommerce platform that can accommodate multiple accounts is one of the prerequisites for approaching an organization and winning their uniform contracts.
Your eCommerce store must be able to hold and manage multiple uniform accounts of large organizations without any hiccups. It must also simplify managing these accounts and allow you to have a bird's eye view of your business through a single and clear dashboard.
And finally, the eCommerce platform must be able to support your business growth by being scalable as you add more and more uniform accounts to your portfolio.
Providing a personalized uniform buying experience to the employees of your clients is a simple yet effective way to win their uniform contracts.
However, not many platforms in the market today support this functionality of providing personalization options.
One such option is enabling embroidery and embellishment functionality for the employees to select from the preset designs, for example, company logo, or upload their own design before placing the order.
This is an extremely handy functionality especially in the Public Safety industry as almost all the departments have a unique badge with nametapes.
Providing embroidery options with your uniform programs are an effective way to stand apart from the sea of competitors in the market and eventually win more uniform contracts.
An eCommerce store might not be able to house all the required functionality that’s important in running your uniform programs smoothly.
The answer to it is having an eCommerce platform that supports numerous integrations from multiple categories.
The eCommerce platform must be able to seamlessly transfer data from between your online uniform store and the integrated application and vice versa, while providing you with the desired functionality.
This kind of seamless functionality is essential when you have a Single Sign-On (SSO) capability enabled in your online store for quick checkout and login, and also when you want to integrate your online business with procurement systems and ERP systems among many others.
Despite having an eCommerce platform that supports all the functionality that is required to provide a rich uniform buying experience to employees, it is important to make sure the platform is future-proof and can support new technological requirements.
For example, the unforeseen pandemic has created a socially-distant world that called for newer alternatives like sizing solutions to bridge the physical gap from the comfort and safety of one’s homes or anywhere in the world.
Similarly, newer technologies and solutions arise every day. Your eCommerce platform must be able to effortlessly integrate them into your uniform providing experience without spending additional resources.
You might have already understood that you need a robust and flexible eCommerce platform that helps you overcome the above-mentioned challenges and more.
However, not many technology providers have such a solution built with the uniform industry in mind. Most of the eCommerce platforms are either generic or require additional customization and development in order to possess such specific functionality.
For example, some of the unique functionalities like multiple payment ledgers, payment precedence, allowances, supervisor ordering and approvals, and more are pretty much non-existent in a generic eCommerce platform.
If it isn’t obvious already, we are the only eCommerce providers to support such unique and powerful functionalities that can help you in winning more uniform bids and contracts than your competitors.
Don’t believe it? Get on a call with one of our experts and we will take you through how our platform can help you reach your business goals effortlessly.
