Retail has always been a difficult industry, but in 2026, it’s more difficult than ever. Increasing inflation, increasing labour costs and increasing production costs are almost constant factors now. This means margins are often paper-thin.
Meanwhile, customer expectations have never been higher. People want a seamless shopping experience across multiple channels, and to shop the way they want now, even if that’s different from the way they want to shop tomorrow.
For businesses, providing that experience is difficult. Providing it in a cost-efficient way is even more difficult. But, if you fail to do so, the whole validity of your business can begin to crumble.
Technology like enterprise resource planning software (ERPs), AI and other retail software can make it feasible to offer the high-quality experience customers (and economies) demand without destroying your profits. But you have to find the right one for your business.
Over 43,000 businesses worldwide currently trust NetSuite to be their ERP solution. And as award-winning NetSuite partners, we know exactly why they do. In this post, we’ll set out 5 reasons why your retail business should choose NetSuite over any other ERP to help make your business as efficient (and profitable) as possible.
NetSuite is a leading enterprise resource planning (ERP) software. It’s a unified, cloud-based business management solution that has the ability to streamline operations across many business departments.
The exact improvements it brings will depend on the size and industry of your business. For retail businesses, its integrated suite of applications centralises data to give you more insights, improve decision-making and allow you to give your customers an excellent purchasing experience.
NetSuite is designed to meet the needs of many industries, including retail. It has features specifically designed to boost efficiency for retail businesses, including inventory management, fulfilment, accounts receivable and accounts payable.
It also has integrated shipping capabilities to help eCommerce businesses ship products more efficiently, and business intelligence features to help with demand forecasting and identifying trends in channels, suppliers and customer behaviours. It can even help you to measure marketing campaign performance using role-based dashboards and real-time key performance indicators.
Finally, NetSuite reduces the time needed for manual data input and analysis across all areas and departments of your retail business, leaving staff free to do the work that really matters.
One of the biggest challenges currently facing retail businesses is meeting cross-channel demand. Research by Akeeno has shown that 76% of shoppers use multiple channels as part of their buying journey. Offering just a purchasing channel is not enough; all your channels need to fit (and work) together for one seamless buying (and service) experience.
NetSuite helps you do this by giving you complete visibility across your inventory, order management, in-store Point Of Sales systems (POS) and financial management. It even gives you clearer oversight of CRM and marketing, so you can streamline things into their most efficient form.
It also unifies your online and in-store shopping experiences, so customers can shop in the way that suits them. It supports offerings such as purchasing online with same-day in-store collection, and allows the widest possible shopping experience.
In turn, this gives you an advantage over your competitors because not only can you offer the most buying options, but customers can stay with you for their entire buying journey, so the chances of even discovering your competitors are reduced.
For a retail business, inventory management is something that can define your success. If you’re not able to see your inventory levels across every location at any time, your operations are hampered. You might be left with more stock than you can sell, wasting money on unnecessary purchases and transportation. Alternatively, you might run out of stock when needed, leaving customers disappointed and missing out on sales.
In fact, IHL research found that in 2025, around $500 billion was lost globally due to inventory distortion and poor management. NetSuite can help tackle this.
That’s because NetSuite puts all this vital information into one single source. A source that is based in the cloud, so it’s always up to date and accessible everywhere. It ensures you’re always able to make informed decisions, automate stock orders so that you never run out, and redirect stock that builds up in one location.
Even further, NetSuite’s advanced analytics and forecasting tools mean that this data works harder to protect future planning. You can use stock levels and sales patterns to forecast demand and take a proactive approach to ordering without having to spend hours poring over reports or sales data to mine the insights you need.
In 2026, it still takes around 6-8 touchpoints for a customer to make a purchase. NetSuite won’t just make sure their journey between each touch point is smooth; it can help you get a clear view of their whole process so you can optimise.
NetSuite centralises all your customer data. This helps you understand preferences, purchase history and buyer behaviour of your customers so you can tailor your marketing more effectively. It helps you see what is working and what isn’t, so you can improve strategies and tailor your offering more to their needs and behaviour.
This also allows your team to provide better customer service. By being able to view all this customer information in the same place, they can answer complex queries more quickly, find satisfactory outcomes based on specific customer histories instead of generic expectations, and generally take your customer service to the next level.
The combined effect of all of the above benefits goes beyond the operational side of your business. It improves customer experience, too.
In turn, a better customer experience inspires more purchases. A more integrated multi-channel experience allows less chance for customers to be diverted to your competitors, inspires brand loyalty and encourages customers to return for further purchases and inspires trust so they will spend larger amounts of money with you when they do.
NetSuite helps remove the friction from your customer journey. Better inventory management means your visitors won’t find themselves unable to buy items they want. It means if they choose to research purchases online, but buy them in person, customers can get an accurate idea of stock levels in your physical location to prevent a wasted journey. It also makes buyers less likely to see products they paid full price for significantly reduced a few weeks later when you’ve oversold, which inspires mistrust about pricing.
Lastly, it allows you to deepen the ‘self-service experience’ so customers can see their own purchase histories, find answers to their questions, place reorders and find related items whenever they want or need, without having to wait until your physical stores are open.
Research suggests that over 50% of customers will change to a seller with less friction in the purchase process. So, of all the benefits a NetSuite ERP system brings to your business, improved customer satisfaction could be one of the most important.
NetSuite for Retail brings together all your operational data and processes to make your business operations more efficient. Financial management, supply chain and order management, stock control and CRM are united in one cloud-based platform, so you can see your entire operation in real time. Any time.
Work with an award-winning NetSuite provider
If you’d like to learn more about how NetSuite ERP can help you protect your margins, achieve regulatory compliance, manage costs and meet customer expectations, NoBlue2 can help you implement a solution that more than delivers. Speak to our team today to find out more.
