How To Optimize Shopify Purchase Order Flow With Cogsy

Cogsy is the only purchase order workflow that saves Shopify merchants 20+ hours a week. All while empowering them to place more accurate POs.

As a Shopify merchant, your inventory is your lifeline. But if you don’t put enough on your purchase order, you fall down a bit of a slippery slope.

For starters, you won’t have the stock needed to make the sale. But also, you’ll see your customer experience deteriorate, your brand image suffer, and your sales drop as a result.

Meaning, how you manage your inventory determines your brand’s trajectory.

For instance, if you maintain optimal stock levels, you’ll see your sales trend upwards. But if you stockout or dealing with dead stock, you’ll see your profits take a nose dive.

The difference between these scenarios is typically as simple as using the right end-to-end purchasing too.

Enter Cogsy, the missing purchase order flow for Shopify brands.

Why your purchase order flow matters

Purchase orders (POs) are legal contracts outlining a brand’s commitment to buy a certain amount of goods from its vendor.

Get these documents wrong (read: put too much or too little on your PO), and you’ll find yourself overstocked or understocked (respectively).

Both situations introduce unnecessary cash flow issues to your business.

But get these documents right, and you ensure your brand has the right amount of inventory available to meet customer demand. And do it as efficiently as possible (meaning, every unit sells at a profit).

The problem with Shopify’s PO process

For most Shopify brands, placing purchase orders is a very manual (read: tedious) process. One that requires hundreds of hours of spread-sheet-based demand forecasting before you can even pretend to start filling out the official PO.

For one, this process alone is its own full-time job. Meaning, it takes over 40 hours a week for most brands (the more SKUs you have to manage, the longer it takes).

This process is also prone to silly human mistakes (like entry errors and duplicate lines).

But that’s not even the worst of it. The biggest problem with Shopify’s current purchase order workflow is that it’s reactive.

Since the pandemic, supply chains have been volatile (arguably, more than ever). As an added challenge, customer demand now changes in a blink.

The brands that are leading the herd are those that can maintain optimal inventory levels, despite whatever customer demand is doing.

This requires real-time inventory visibility and a streamlined PO workflow from draft to delivery. Luckily, Cogsy offers both.

How Cogsy levels up your purchase order workflow

Cogsy is an end-to-end purchasing platform that provides Shopify merchants the inventory visibility they need to operate with 100% certainty. And it saves top Shopify brands (like Caraway) 20 hours a week on average.

Here’s what you can do with it:

Never stock out again

Cogsy tracks your inventory levels in real-time. The moment you start running low, we’ll send you friendly replenish alerts, letting you know it’s time to restock.

These alerts are personalized to each SKU’s reorder point. That way, you always get them with enough time to place your next purchase order and for you to get that shipment before you stock out.

Always order the right inventory

Say goodbye to guessing what inventory needs to be on your next purchase order.

Cogsy’s marketing events and growth planning features help you build smart inventory plans that address best-case, worst-case, and most-probable scenarios.

That way, you can plan for future inventory purchases and set aside the cash you’ll need. When it’s time to place a purchase order, Cogsy will send you that replenish alert (mentioned above).

Better yet, each alert comes with restock recommendations, so you know exactly how much or what to order. These recommendations safeguard against potential human errors (like overestimating your inventory needs).

How exactly? By outlining what to order, how much, and where to send that inventory so you only invest in stock that will turn a profit.

(You can even bulk-add these recommendations and auto-fill vendor information to expedite how you build out POs.)

Simplify how you manage vendors

Cogsy houses all your important vendor need-to-knows (like contact info and contracts) in one place.

Work with multiple vendors? Coordinate your preferred vendors to clarify who provides what SKU.

Every time you add items to your purchase orders, Cogsy will use these preferences to auto-fill the corresponding supplier information.

That way, you always place orders with your most reliable supply chain partners.

Make PO management headache-free

Managing multiple purchase orders is… a lot. Luckily, with Cogsy, you can add multiple shipments to one PO. That way, you can procure all the inventory you need while placing fewer POs.

Even better, get a bird’s eye view of where all your purchase orders currently stand, from draft to delivery. So, you know what inventory is on its way and where it’s at.

As you know, this level of inventory visibility is key to managing your inventory smarter and reaching your revenue goals. In fact, brands that sell with Cogsy generate 40% more revenue on average.

But don’t just take our word for it – try Cogsy free for 14 days.