How To Maintain Good Relationship With Your Suppliers?

Developing relationship with suppliers becomes very important to increase reliability and business, both, when you sell products.

As and when you grow and start receiving multiple sales order for your retail business, you need to ensure you are getting better rates, quick service, and overall growth. Retailers who overlook the importance of suppliers need to realize purchase order failure can lead to increased stress, angry customers, as well as, loss of profits.

Like any other relationship you maintain, one with your supplier be constantly nurtured.

So, what practices can you adopt for maintaining a healthy relationship with your suppliers?

1- Communicate frequently

Coordinating with your suppliers only while making purchases, will limit understandings between you’ll. Also, it becomes difficult to convince them in emergency situations, and end up with huge delays in procuring products from your suppliers.

The foremost thing to maintain a healthy relation with suppliers, is to be in constant touch with them. This means communicating regularly with your suppliers will develop a unique bonding which makes it easy for suppliers to fulfill your needs, especially when required the most.

2- Release payments on time

The ugly truth- conflict in payments directly hampers relationships. Late payments, or even no payment directly creates a bad impression, which in-turn will spread a bad-word-of-mouth among other suppliers. This way, clearing your purchase order payments in time will help you automatically create a unique trust, helping you to enhance your relationship with them.

3- Be clear about return policy

Many times you’ll experience some of your stocks are left unsold, due to many reasons. In such cases, you need to ensure that your suppliers are ready to accept returns. Unable to do so, will kill your capital, which is not at all good for your business.

Make sure your suppliers have a strong return policy in place that is clear, to avoid confusions and arguments at the time of returns.

4- Provide complimentary gifts during occasions

In this modern world, it’s more of give-and-take relationship- which means if you are looking to build a healthy relationship with your supplier, then you need to offer something that is valuable to them. Wishing them on special occasions is not enough, instead offering them freebies or complementary products that they would like, will help you win their hearts.

5- Track supplier’s performance

Using a chain of emails to manage and coordinate with suppliers automatically creates confusions, which in turn, directly affects the relationship between you and your suppliers. Therefore, having a cloud-based inventory will help you systematically consolidate all your suppliers in one place from where you can easily track their performance anytime, from anywhere. And, having an ability to do so will make it easy to enhance relationships with your suppliers day-after-day. The best way to do it is to use a purchase order management software. This is what will quantify the performance of the supplier across a period of time.

In Closing

Building healthy relationships with suppliers is not a complicated process, however ignoring it completely can lead to many confusions and misunderstandings that is not good for any retailer’s business.

Following the above tips, you’ll secure a timely order process, better rates, eliminate wastage of capital, improve customers, as well as, increase sales.

Goodluck!