Macdaddy Music expands through marketplaces and automated inventory management with Linnworks.
Macdaddy Music have been helping musicians get the tone they want and the gear they need since 2005. From day one, they have specialized in selling music equipment online. But over the years, they’ve become more specialized in guitar equipment and accessories.
Challenges: Manual processes holding back expansion and growth.
Early growth for Macdaddy Music consisted largely of expanding their product selection and expanding into sales channels as they became more prominent. As business grew, the issues associated with ecommerce also grew and became more obvious.
For a number of years, Aaron Peterson, owner of Macdaddy Music, was manually managing product sales on their website and across well known third party marketplaces, including Amazon, eBay, Walmart and Reverb, making the process receptive to mistakes and problems.
Aaron explains, “We were trying to manage everything manually, but then we’d run into problems of overselling if we sold out products on one place and didn’t manually update the quantity somewhere else quickly enough. It was a lot of work that never ended and we especially noticed it when our order volumes increased.”
Macdaddy Music has always used Quickbooks as the hub of their business and everything feeds into it. Manual processes associated with inventory management meant that Aaron and his team always had to make sure they were manually updating information into the back end of both Quickbooks and the third party marketplaces they use.
Aaron said, “We even had a basic Excel spreadsheet with price changes or quantity values which again was a very manual process that wasn’t sustainable.”
Solution: One platform that automates inventory and order management across multiple sales channels.
Back in 2010, Aaron knew something had to change but wasn’t aware solutions existed in the market to help with inventory and order management.
A cold call from a previous provider, ChannelAdvisor, was an eye opener and game changer for Aaron.
He shared, “When I realized the time that I would be saving and the ability to automate tasks I’d been doing manually, I said sign me up immediately.”
It didn’t take long for Aaron to get up to speed with their previous solution and understand what core features were the most important to Macdaddy Music.
“The deal breakers for me were syncing inventory and importing orders across channels, price updates and listing management tools,” Aaron said.
It became quickly apparent to Aaron that the previous provider had this functionality but a lot of other things that weren’t a necessity.
Aaron explains, “I saw value in investing in a system but realized we were only using and needed a very small percentage of the solution but paying for everything.”
Feeling confident in what the business needed, Macdaddy Music made the decision to move to Linnworks to focus on those important key features.
“We migrated from ChannelAdvisor to prioritize inventory sync and connections with our priority selling channels.” Aaron said.
Another majorly important feature for Macdaddy Music was the connectivity to multiple third party sales channels. In addition, it was important to have the ability to list through one platform instead of having to list products in the back end of multiple platforms such as Amazon and eBay. At first, Aaron was hesitant to connect multiple channels and list products through one system, but Linnworks gave him the confidence to manage listings and inventory across multiple channels through one central platform.
“The channel integrations functionality has expanded in recent years and it’s made our lives incredibly easier. We’ve really noticed the impact on our business.” Aaron said.
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