Wu Wei is the practice of no force, or otherwise said to be the art of effortless living. As a small business owner this is not only what I practice, but also what I look for in systems, apps and processes within my business.
Konigle is an app for both Shopify and Shopee. I love it as it encapsulates the principles of Wu Wei and allows me to easily and efficiently manage critical business fundamentals which I define as tactical automation. Specifically for Konigle these include:
- Pricing and Profit Optimization.
- Posting
- Understand and increasing value to my customers
There have always been two rules that I stick to that have allowed me to run my small business for over a decade and scale it to over 7 figures :
- Manage overheads mainly through automation (have less staff and do more work)
- Ensure everything I do can be done within a minute (otherwise look at the process and automate the task or tactic).
I use apps and connections for automation from marketing/ social media posting, accounting and book-keeping, order processing and management. However, out of all apps and plugins that I use for my Shopify store, Konigle has become the cornerstone app that helps me manage many facets of my company which I’ll dig into below.
For the price of a Starbucks coffee per month (approx. $9.50-$20) I get to deploy and use the Konigle app. When I compare this to the time savings which are well over 400 man hours per month, this app is a must have!
One of the mega features of the Konigle Profit Improvement System for me is that they can handle wholesale pricing. Historically when you run a business-to-business (B2B) company you would need to have a full time admin person to:
- Process orders,
- Chase payments and
- Reconcile statements
This person could range from $2000-$7500 per month!
The Konigle system enables everything to be bought online. The B2B solution allows you to set up pricing tiers for clients and push all of their orders online through a Shopify cart. Other than not having an admin for this process other benefits are:
- The customer is in charge of what they put into the cart and there is 100% accuracy in order
- The customer can come back to the cart in their preferences and see what they have purchased before, you can set up frequently purchased products or a standardized card for the customer so then they also save time on the re-ordering process.
- As a bonus, using the Konigle Checkout Tool, I can understand what products are being discarded on my checkouts and try to fix my pricing for the same.
By centralizing the ordering process within Shopify you can also automate many other accounting processes.
There are other Apps on the market such as Bold Wholesale pricing, however this standalone app will cost $29-$49 a month and will only do one thing. Konigle has dozens of features that you can access so it is a much better value.
What attracted me to the Konigle system from the outset was their focus on trying to help me, as an SME, not only save time and sell more, but also retain as much margin and profit over time. One of the largest components of their tool are the price management and discounting tools that are extremely advanced. Here are a few highlights:
Never miss a sales day again!
If you are like me and are managing many projects at any given time, major sales events can often slip out of your mind. It doesn’t matter if it’s a national holiday period or a mega event like Cyber Monday, Konigle allows you to quickly jump into the system, set the date, set the discount and walk away. The system will do the rest. Pushing the discount on the date requested and then reverting all pricing back to original at the end.
You can be on holiday relaxing on a beach, and this system will continue to drive your business forward
Do you have products that have a shelf life?
In my business I call these items ‘ticking time bombs’. Allowing stock to run down to ‘too close to shelf life’ has many compounding issues for a business such as:
- Returns and rejections from B2B customers
- Unhappy B2C clients who end up leaving negative reviews
- Decrease in overall profitability as you are perpetually discounting to clear
- A market perception that you are a discount centric brand. This leads to customers waiting to bulk buy when discounts are offered!
Given the above, it is imperative to make sure you are extracting the most value out of each item as it draws closer to its expiration date.
The Konigle system deploys its automation specifically around this. Konigle knows how much stock you sell of any given item on a rolling monthly basis. Armed with this insight Konigle is able to automatically apply discounts to products to increase their likelihood of selling on a programmatic basis so you avoid a situation of expired stock in your warehouse!
Conversely the Konigle system will raise prices if the item is not going to run out. That’s right, the Konigle system knows your primary intention is to make profit.
Discounting based on cart
Konigle is a big data powerhouse and one of the magic features it offers is insights and offers into key products. For example, we are all familiar with dropped cart emails, but what may surprise you is the number of products that are added to a cart and dropped before any details are added. These products are your leading indicator products. When Konigle sees patterns in this stage of your cart, it may make a suggestion to offer a discount on those leading items, in order to increase conversion. Look at it this way, you may have done all of the work bringing new customers to your store, only to not get them sold at the first stage.In order to maximize your marketing ROAs, the Konigle tool is a key to unlock sales that you would otherwise not be aware of.
Competitive analysis is time consuming and boring. Spreadsheets, scanning websites ideally needs to happen on a monthly if not weekly basis for your brand to stay competitive in the market.
Konigle has a built in tool that allows you to quickly and easily track competitors!
You will need to take the time to set up the customers that you want to track (or just click a button for the machine to make an auto suggestion) and you will be up and running.
For my Shopee store this feature doesn’t just tell me the pricing that my competitors are at now, it will accumulate data on your competitors such as how many units they sell, pricing strategies they use and popularity of their products.
For those who are planning pricing strategies and wanting to understand what is selling the best in the market, these insights are key.
Another set and forget tool is the charm pricing or psychological pricing feature.
Anyone who has studied marketing will have learnt about the psychological phenomenon of people purchasing more of a product when it is rounded in a certain format. This could be .75 or .99. It may also be something that has a relevant meaning to a certain community, such as rounding to .88 on a specific sale day for stores in Asia, with the .88 being an auspicious number.
Konigle will automatically round pricing to your preferred charm pricing. Thus once again increasing potential conversion.
I am sure there are many more features that are on the way with Konigle in the future. As it stands, it is the most powerful tool on the market for pricing automation.
The features I have mentioned above are only ones that I use. There are many more that I have not yet deployed but are on my roadmap to maximize my tactical automation.
As I said at the start of the article Wu Wei is the art of no force and with the Konigle app, I feel confident that we are truly using big data and the analytic systems of Konigle as well as deep empathy for SMEs like me to ensure we capture the highest amount of sales and profit possible while providing the best value to our customers.
Konigle is a no-brainer tool to have as a Shopify or Shopee seller.