Telling the future might be impossible, but that doesn’t mean that your business’s future needs to be an inscrutable black box when it comes to how it may perform.

Like most web-centered retail businesses, you’ve been using a Shopify store as your sales headquarters. But like most online retailers, you’re limited by the stock tools that Shopify offers. And while there are a multitude of available third-party and native Shopify solutions to your biggest problems, they simply may not be what’s best for your business.

It’s likely you can get more use out of Shopify if you look toward a composable ERP solution — but how do you know if you’re ready to integrate something like that?

That’s easy: you’ve likely seen one (or more) of the five signs your Shopify store needs an ERP upgrade. This guide will define each sign, give you some context on what causes these problems, and show you how an upgrade can help.

The First Sign: Stockouts are Happening Constantly

Inventory issues are a dime a dozen, if you’re a small business on Shopify: you miscounted the stock available of your most popular t-shirt by one unit. No problem, you’ve got more stock coming and can make your customer whole only a few days later than expected. You’re apologetic, they understand, and you toss in a freebie to smooth things over.

Unfortunately, those little inventory issues can lull any business operator (small to enterprise) into a false sense of security — because the worst kinds of inventory issues are silent, sneaky, and can rear their heads completely unexpectedly. With high-volume operations in particular, those “little” warehouse miscounts can go unnoticed for a long time; unnoticed miscounts translate into compounded inventory disasters that pop at the worst time, every time.

These inventory emergencies are certainly not your fault; they’re caused by limitations baked into the native tools made available for Shopify users. They’re fantastic tools for small operations, but they lack the capability for more complex operations. Before you pull the plug on Shopify and move platforms, though, consider leveraging purpose-built solutions that are designed to solve your actual problem and meet your needs.

When you’re experiencing these stockout issues consistently, it could be a signal that:

1. You have failure points. One of your processes may be unoptimized, or your tech stack contains bugs or inconsistencies that create errors.

2. You suffer from confused processes. Your workflows aren’t being translated properly across your teams, meaning that your team may be struggling and need things simplified.

3. You simply need an upgrade. You may need more powerful tools better suited for both where you are right now and where you’d like to go.

Tailor’s Inventory Management module provides the real-time, accurate, and intelligent systems you need to keep up with modern purchasing demand. By integrating our Inventory Management solution into your business, you can power up Shopify with real-time inventory tracking, accurate stock levels across retail or warehouse locations, and leverage your customer data for intelligent forecasting.

The Second Sign: Your Omnichannel Operations are too Complex

Scaling up your business comes with a number of risks:

• Upfront costs. More capital is spent on growing inventory and acquiring storage.

• Inventory accuracy. Tracking and moving inventory between warehouses can result in missing stock, miscounts, or delayed shipping times.

• Fluctuating demand. Increased inventory means more exposure to seasonal trends (rising and falling demand across more SKUs).

• Omnichannel sync. Overselling inventory due to mismatches in online stock, retail storage, and warehouse counts.

The risks are worth it, but they can be a significant drag on your scaling efforts if they can’t be mitigated. Shopify offers a number of built-in omnichannel tools, but they’re made with one-size-fits-most in mind. And you’re painfully aware that this approach to solution-making leaves edge cases, customization, and "perfect fit” off the table.

Proper omnichannel support should come with peace of mind, not more questions. The way that most of these risks become problems is caused by a lack of cohesion between your omnichannel operations. You’ve got inventory tracked in Shopify, but you use a point-of-sale solution that doesn’t integrate well with Shopify’s API, and your operations team is constantly shuffling data between disconnected dashboards — with spreadsheets as the final source of truth for your inventory counts.

You can probably already feel the day-to-day stress you and your team undergo while keeping up with omnichannel demands. Then add in the risks highlighted above, and you can see just how fragile any scaling business can be at this stage.

Tailor can help eliminate these risks and reduce errors by providing a unified dashboard that talks to your dedicated omnichannel tools. By bringing your POS, Shopify, and warehouse data into one easily accessible place, your ops team can frictionlessly keep track of inventory needs without forcing you to unplug from Shopify or risk your business’s growth potential.

The Third Sign: Conversion Rates are Plummeting

As your business scales, so do the needs of your customers. Shopify offers some basic functionality to give your customers special deals and allow them to purchase bundles. But with every sales environment, a lack of choice can mean lost sales. And if you scale solely off Shopify’s available tools, you may have noticed that conversion rates are dropping steadily — even if your revenue is still keeping pace.

Continuing to allow conversion rates to plummet is just leaving money on the table — so in order to break the cycle, you need to understand what’s actually going wrong:

• Channel-specific pricing. Your customers may not be able to get the items they want at the price they want, where they want them.

• Customized bundles. Shoppers want their online shopping experience to mirror shopping in a retail environment by mixing and matching items into a custom bundle.

In both cases, Shopify’s stock tools limit your ability to give customers what they want, and this can have a negative impact on conversion rates. Thankfully, Tailor offers omnichannel tools that allow you to keep your customers happy by translating customization into something that Shopify can natively understand and leverage.

The Fourth Sign: Your Customers are Frustrated

Good customer service goes so far beyond helping customers when something goes wrong — it’s also about giving your customers an experience that keeps them informed and confident from purchase to arrival. Unfortunately, this is one of the areas that is often overlooked in scaling businesses; they forget that a growth in customer traffic and available catalog also means that customers expect a certain threshold of polish on the fulfillment experience.

When your customers don’t experience this level of polish, it can be exasperating and frustrating. Whether your customers are retail or B2B, they need to have ready access to real-time order status, accurate delivery estimates, and multiple ways to pay for their orders. Relying on standard Shopify tools to meet these needs simply isn’t enough.

Of course, it’s not just being able to track the delivery process. It’s important to know that standard returns processes often don’t cut it when your business is scaling. Your customers also need to be able to engage with your returns system with some flexibility, which can only be achieved by adding additional functionality to Shopify.

Tailor makes keeping your customers happy a breeze. We offer the robust tools (and ongoing technical support) necessary to give your customers unparalleled insight into fulfillment, while also giving them more options for the refund process if something ever goes wrong with their order. By giving your customers more options, you get to keep up your stellar reputation, and they get to keep the items that work best for them.

The Fifth Sign: You’re Ready to Scale Your Business to the Next Level

Sometimes, things going wrong are genuinely caused by accidents and anomalies. In fact, if your business has been running smoothly, that’s exactly what you want.

Stability and predictability are the exact catalysts you need to start scaling, because they keep your risk profile low (and probably mean your processes are streamlined enough to handle increased complexity). When things are going well, it can help make clear that Shopify’s included tools have their limits — but being able to acknowledge this from a place of confidence also means you can make even better decisions on your scaling journey.

If this is how things are going for you, then you’re absolutely poised to successfully scale. Thankfully, you don’t have to worry about leaving Shopify behind. Instead, you can integrate a composable ERP solution that can connect with every API-enabled part of your tech stack, making Shopify extremely powerful, while also positioning your business strongly in the market.

What’s the benefit of integrating tech like this? One of the biggest expenses of scaling is opportunity cost: your business may be ready to scale, but the costs associated with revamping your systems to support that growth leave you in the red. Thankfully, with Tailor’s headless ERP solution, you’re able to skip out on the opportunity costs of a more rigid ERP system and keep doing what’s been working for your business.

Whichever Signs You’re Noticing, Tailor Can Help

The thing about signs is that they should be heeded; few things are more costly than ignoring a problem until it catches fire. Fire fighting and patching holes is only sustainable for so long — which is why it’s important to slow down and consider your next move:

Do you want to solve your problems or do you want to run from them? Solving your problems with Tailor is easy, because we’re able to meet you where you’re at and provide you with purpose-built solutions that help you get the most out of Shopify. Our tools are designed to help you scale, keep your customers happy, increase your conversion rates, simplify omnichannel expansions, and end stockouts.

This is your stop sign: contact us today, and we’ll help you integrate a purpose-built ERP upgrade for your Shopify store.