Macdaddy Music expands through marketplaces and automated inventory management with Linnworks.

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Macdaddy Music has been helping musicians get the tone they want and the gear they need since 2005. Since day one, they’ve specialized in selling music gear online. But over the years, they have become more specialized in guitar gear and accessories.

Challenges: Manual processes that slow down expansion and growth.
Macdaddy Music’s early growth consisted largely of expanding its product selection and expanding into sales channels as they became more prominent. As the business grew, the problems associated with e-commerce also grew and became more apparent.

For several years, Aaron Peterson, owner of Macdaddy Music, manually managed product sales on his website and on well-known third-party marketplaces, including Amazon, eBay, Walmart, and Reverb, making the process receptive to errors and issues. .

Aaron explains, “We were trying to manage everything manually, but then ran into overselling issues if we ran out of products in one place and didn’t manually update the quantity in another place fast 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 center of their business and it all powers it. The manual processes associated with managing inventory meant that Aaron and his team always had to make sure to manually update information in the Quickbooks back-end 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: A platform that automates inventory and order management across multiple sales channels.
In 2010, Aaron knew something had to change, but he didn’t know there were solutions on the market to help with inventory and order management.

A cold call from a previous provider, ChannelAdvisor, was an eye opener and a game changer for Aaron.

He shared: “When I realized the time I would be saving and the ability to automate the tasks I had been doing manually, I said sign up right away.”

It didn’t take long for Aaron to get up to speed with his previous solution and understand which core features were most important to Macdaddy Music.

“The deciding factors for me were inventory syncing and order import across channels, price updates, and listing management tools,” Aaron said.

It quickly became apparent to Aaron that the previous provider had this functionality but many other things that weren’t a necessity.

Aaron explains, “I saw value in investing in a system, but realized we were only using and needing 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 synchronization and connections to our priority sales channels.” Aaron said.

Another very important feature for Macdaddy Music was the connectivity with multiple third-party sales channels. Also, it was important to have the ability to list through one platform instead of having to list products on the back-end of multiple platforms like Amazon and eBay. Aaron was initially 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 a central platform.

“The functionality of channel integrations has expanded in recent years and has made our lives incredibly easier. We have really seen the impact on our business.” Aaron said.

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