Company Spotlight: Virtualstock – Magazine Articles

What is your business doing and what is your USP?

We’re a UK-based Software as a Service (SaaS) company focused on transforming global business supply chains and markets – and helping retailers deliver the exemplary customer experience now demanded by consumers. buyers. Our USP is that we can give retailers an unmatched view of their entire inventory across all of their supply chains and route orders based on configurable business rules. This opens up full control over the customer experience for the retailer – from sourcing a product to delivering it to the customer’s doorstep.

How do you ship on this USP?

Our product, The Edge®, is a modular platform that connects retailers with their suppliers, providing retailers with a single, centralized view of all product data, order information and stock levels for all canals. Additionally, The Edge – which is GS1 certified – can format vendor product data to fit any system or platform, while maintaining full data integrity.

How would you describe your vision?

Our vision is simple: To become the leading provider of digital supply chain solutions for the retail industry by enabling our customers to transform the way they run their supply chain operations. With our platform in place, retailers can focus on delivering a world-class customer experience knowing that their entire supply chain is operating effectively and efficiently.

Which retailers do you work with?

The Edge is widely used by some of the world’s largest and most respected retailers, including Tesco, John Lewis, The Kingfisher Group, Sainsbury’s Argos, Dixon Carphone Warehouse, and Office Depot. While to date we’ve generally operated at the top tier, The Edge easily scales to meet the needs of mid-tier retailers and vendors – and we’re seeing considerable interest here.

How would you describe your growth, what have been the main points of expansion and what has been the key to your success?

Our growth has doubled year on year as we continued to recruit top clients in the UK and the EU. We now have over 100 highly skilled people working in the company who bring in-depth supply chain knowledge to our business. The key to Virtualstock’s success is that we created The Edge at a time when online sales were a small percentage of a retailer’s overall revenue. With online sales in the UK rising from around £ 30bn in 2012 to around £ 70bn forecast for 2018, this now represents around 15-20% of a retailer’s non-food sales. In some categories, like consumer electronics, this percentage can be around 90% online. Our vision and innovation have enabled us to anticipate online growth and offer a simple, scalable and cost-effective solution to the demands created by today’s consumers.

How can you help multi-channel retailers meet peak demands?

The main peak season challenge for retailers is that their infrastructure is often unable to provide the same level of service at peak times. When ordering online, a customer’s main question is usually “Where is my order?” Our platform communicates real-time order status tracking to retailers, which can be instantly transmitted to the buyer, relieving customer service pressures and avoiding unnecessary costs for the retailer. We also allow retailers to offer a significantly expanded line at a time of fierce competition. By facilitating their entire drop shipping solution, The Edge makes it easy for retailers to add many more products without the risk of holding inventory at a time when efficient use of warehouse space is critical. The Edge also offers real-time visibility into drop-shipping orders, ensuring that the customer experience matches that of an order from any other channel.

Our vision is simple: To become the leading provider of digital supply chain solutions for the retail industry by enabling our customers to transform the way they run their supply chain operations.

How is your technology helping support retail growth?

We are always improving our product to offer innovations to retailers. We have a strategic and global partnership with IBM, which brings a multitude of new technologies to our platform thanks to its knowledge of blockchain and AI. We connect The Edge to Watson to blend internal and external retailer data, ranging from orders, inventory levels to weather patterns, to deliver a new level of insight to retailers. We have also partnered with GS1 to verify GTIN barcodes on products that suppliers provide to retailers. The platform automatically validates the code against a central standards body to determine the authenticity of an item. Previse also works with us to provide suppliers with immediate payments when they receive an order. Retailers can see what they purchased from a vendor and its location in real time, while vendors instantly receive payments for the delivery of their merchandise.

One sentence elevator pitch to use as a direct quote on how your business benefits retailers

“The Edge can connect to any system, giving retailers full control over all supplier orders, inventory and product data and enabling them to compete in a rapidly evolving and consumer-dominated market. client experience. “

To learn more about Virtual Stock, please visit their website: virtualstock.com