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A Nottingham-based record label, Earache Records sell music and merchandise both for their own artists and on behalf of other labels. When they joined us, they were shipping around 1,000 orders per month, drawing on around a little under 10,000 SKUs (plus variations). A little under a quarter of these belong to their artists.
Earache Records sell in the UK and overseas via Amazon & eBay. They also have their own eCommerce website, which they’ve heavily developed over the years according to their requirements.
Therefore, it was important to them that sales for other labels can be tracked separately for accurate records of royalties.
The Challenge
Earache were looking for opportunities to improve their internal processes, reducing errors and speeding up order processing. They wanted to be able to more easily manage their multiple sales channels. Another common complaint was how many services and interfaces they had to switch between just to process an individual order.
When processing orders from other suppliers, they found that ordering resupply could often be inefficient. They also mentioned that selling to smaller trade retailers had started taking too much extra time to process for their return, and were very interested in our trade customer services.
Given the nature of their industry, they were also keen to find a better way of managing pre-orders; taking payment, recording details, processing orders without them being lost in the ongoing business of the company.
Lack of shared inventory records
International shipping details needing manual handling
Time lost replying to customer queries across channels
Picking and packing was inefficient
Our Solution
During early meetings we mapped out their requirements and took the time to get a clear sense of what they needed and what they wanted.
We’d discussed a need to improve picking and packing. As all of their SKUs are already barcoded, warehouse scanning was the obvious way to achieve this, and fully integrates with the stock control aspect of the system.
The ability to filter stock reports and by supplier and track purchase orders from external suppliers makes keeping records of where royalties must be paid easy.
“The Cloud Commerce Pro team created a system that integrated our several different stores into one online central control centre (Amazon, eBay etc. all included), linked up with DHL & Royal Mail couriers and the capabilities to be linked to our suppliers too.
The time-saving factor has been amazing since the switch on. Each store’s data now updates all at once instead of logging into every store individually. We now have the option to have an electronic stock take of inventory auto-updating with every purchase.
Before CCP, our posting process was very manual. Handwritten customs on packages, ink stamps on all mail with everything needing individually weighing. A process which you can imagine took hours each day now slimmed down just simply bagging items now in minutes. Besides this we would be attaching up to 4 labels onto a package (CN22, Address, Airmail, Tracking). All of which are now incorporated in a simple 2 labels max using Royal Mail’s Intersoft software.
The shipping team have been so helpful with the process. Whenever we needed something adding to our data they would implement it. Even more complicated requests such as the changing the data on our mailing CN22 labels, headers on invoices etc, they sorted it. Coming back very promptly after phone calls with the implemented changes and screen-shares to explain them in depth, the support from the staff at CCP has been outstanding. They are always happy to tackle any issue.
I ran the DHL side of the orders manually up and till now, the time saving aspect on this is so substantial with all shipping data being copied across automatically saving me up to 30 minutes of copy and paste into the shipping fields.
Would highly recommend Cloud Commerce Pro to any online businesses that are looking to expend/save time and automate more of their daily needs.”
Mike Mayor, Earache Records