A cartoon person selecting an item from a Trello board

According to Deloitte, this year’s retail holiday sales are expected to increase between 4% and 6%, compared to the 2021 season—holiday sales will reach $1.45 to $1.47 trillion. Deloitte also projects e-commerce holiday sales will grow 12.8% to 14.3%, compared to last year.

And although some shoppers may not have as much discretionary income as others, customers are still going to make cash registers ring with holiday cheer.

If you want to capture a portion of this year’s discretionary spending, Trello has your back. After all, those hoverboards aren’t going to buy themselves. Trello Enterprise can empower your consumer-goods business with the same care and attention to detail our project management tools have always provided—reimagined for your retail brand.

How to use Trello for shipping goods

As holiday orders ramp up, take your shipping information out of a spreadsheet and put it into a Trello board. If you’re not sure where to begin, create cards with the following headers: 

  • Order entry
  • On hold
  • In production
  • Shipped
  • Delivered
  • Archived

Trello has many product and sales integrations to customize your workflow. Pre-built boards like this Interior Design Order Tracking template are helpful for visualizing the end result of your sales efforts.

Screenshot of an Interior Design Order Tracking board template in TrelloTry a pre-made template like this Interior Design Order Tracking board to help visualize your sales process.

Best used for smaller shipments, create Trello cards for each order that comes in and label them with an order number, client name, and item name. Want to track where your products are going? Try Map View—available to Premium and Enterprise customers—to coordinate orders across cities, states, and even countries. Someone tell Santa it’s time for a tech upgrade. 

How to use Trello for order tracking

Don’t let any special deliveries get left behind in Santa’s Workshop. Boards from Trello Enterprise makes it easy to track the average cycle time of deliveries, which provides important feedback about the fulfillment process of your retail business. You’ll quickly see any areas where processes are getting held up. 

How to use Trello to track your company’s fulfillment process:

Design an order workflow and use the Order Fulfillment template to help you. We also have templates designed for small Etsy businesses.

trello-retail-etsy-order-fulfilScreenshot of an Etsy Order Fulfillment board template in Trellolment-templateTrello boards like this Etsy Order Fulfillment template can help small businesses keep track of sales and orders.

Determine the workflow and list structure that best fits your business. According to SendBoard, a basic e-commerce workflow list may be similar to this:

  • Inbox (orders): Get all order notifications in one central location—even if you manage multiple e-commerce stores. Each card in this board represents a single order as it moves left to right through the process stages.
  • Customer customization: If your business offers customized goods, you may need to communicate with external suppliers to complete the order. Send and reply to emails directly within Trello.
  • Packaging: Manage your company’s packaging process and team up with colleagues to take care of to-do items before orders are shipped off.
  • Shipment progress: Keep your customers informed about their order status and tracking for their package. 
  • Ask for a review: Once you’ve gotten all your orders out the door, don’t forget to politely ask customers to write reviews of their purchases.

If the above structure doesn’t work for your business, you probably need different workflow elements. You can track the progress of physical goods using the example list below:

  • Request
  • Approve
  • Manufacture
  • Build
  • Deliver
  • Invoice
  • Pay 

How to use Trello for inventory tracking

One of Trello’s most useful built-in features, Custom Fields, provides a match made in inventory-tracking heaven. Custom Fields—available for Standard, Premium, and Enterprise customers—are powerful customization tools for your Trello boards. They allow you to add new types of fields and data into your cards to better align them to your workflow.

Dashcards are a helpful Trello Power-Up that your team can use to measure your work done in collaboration. They open up so many new ways to discuss and report on goals at a higher level. For example, you could manage your own to-dos by tracking assigned cards, ensure the team’s workload is manageable across boards, or keep an eye on the health of a sales pipeline by summing up deal opportunities stored in numeric Custom Fields.

Screenshot of Dashcards being used in Trello.Try the Dashcards Power-Up and simplify tracking your cards, workflows, and goals across cards and boards. 

You could also add Dashcards as a Power-Up to the existing Trello Inventory Management template, built by Smart Fields, to enter inventory that’s going in or out of a company. Smart Fields is a Trello template component that automatically updates inventory when it’s sold, returned, or renewed. Smart Fields lets you keep track of in-house inventory, price, value, and other important data points you need to measure for your business. Customize Smart Fields to fit your needs—you can enter the exact items you have in stock, your locations, etc.

Screenshot of an Inventory Management board template, powered by Smart Fields, in Trello.Try an Inventory Management Trello template, powered by Smart Fields, and simplify your stocking process.

How to use Trello for product promotion

Competition for attention is fierce as shoppers search for that perfect holiday gift, so you have to be on top of your sales and promotions. Trello Enterprise can help you keep track of your social media and content calendar for online promos.

Use Trello’s powerful Marketing & Social Media Power-Ups for your product launch. Create a different card for every stage of the process and move it along as you reach new milestones.

Screenshot of Trello’s Marketing and Social Media Power-Ups.Discover all of Trello’s Marketing and Social Media Power-Ups to help you launch your product.

Trello Enterprise has a V2MOM template for syncing your team by asking a series of questions regarding their experience.

  • Vision: “What do you want to achieve?”
  • Values: “What’s important to you?”
  • Methods: “How do you get what’s important to you?”
  • Obstacles: “What is preventing you from being successful?”
  • Measures: “How do you know you have it (the important thing/success)?”

Trello also empowers teams to create cards for generated leads, contests and giveaways, and upgrades—this could be especially helpful for holiday giveaways and promotions. These cards can help your team know who to reach out to first when determining potential brand advocates.

How to use Trello for CRM management

As you gain new customers throughout the holiday season, you’ll want to be sure you continue to build those relationships into the new year. Trello Enterprise as a customer relationship management (CRM) tool can be a cost-effective alternative to traditional CRM software, as there are different plans available for any price point. 

Screenshot of a CRM template in Trello.Try a CRM template to get started managing your customer relationships in one easy-to-use tool.

To use Trello as a CRM:

  1. Determine your sales pipeline to help you build out the rest of your CRM. (Try a CRM template!)
  2. Design your Trello board with cards to lay out the sales process.
  3. Create cards within your Trello board to keep track of leads, prospects, and customers. You can also use Trello’s Views feature to see your CRM information presented in meaningful ways—like Table View for filter options, labeling, and adding due dates, or Dashboard View for reporting and sales insights. 

How to use Trello for retail events

Planning retail events is a stressful job—especially during the holidays. As you deck the halls with boughs of holly, it’s easy to get overwhelmed. But like a good elf, Trello is here to help.

If you’re not sure where to start, you can try the Retail Sales Pipeline template. With this template, users can view their sales pipeline across all their locations, helping to streamline their process.

Screenshot of Trello’s Retail Sales Pipeline.Trello’s Retail Sales Pipeline board template gives you a great starting point for your own goods and services’ pipeline.

Take some of the pressure off of one person’s event-planning shoulders by using the Multi-board Guest feature, only available in Trello Enterprise. With Multi-board Guest capabilities, users can delegate tasks to outside vendors to help distribute the planning responsibilities. For example, if you’re having a holiday party for all your biggest clients, you can invite the caterer to the relevant Trello board as a multi-board guest and have them update their card as needed.

The biggest component of a great event is organization. With Advanced Checklists, managers can add list items, and assign tasks and due dates to team members. When using Advanced Checklists, the task, any associated staff member, and a due date will appear in your Calendar View and on the Trello home screen when you’re logged on. Our Advanced Checklists feature is only available for Standard, Premium, and Enterprise users.

Screenshot of Trello’s Calendar View.Trello’s Calendar View in its Enterprise plan.

When we’re talking about planning events, we should also be talking about Trello’s other Views. In addition to Calendar View, Trello offers a Timeline View, Map View, and Dashboard View to illustrate your vision and help you feel confident in your execution.

Planning events is also about spending wisely. Use Trello Enterprise to make sure you’re staying on budget. Track estimated costs—and real costs—bids from suppliers, invoices, and more. Share this information with company-wide boards that are visible in other departments like Finance, Marketing, or PR—even if you don’t share a Workspace.

Finally, the Forms Power-Up can help you create a sign-up form for your vendor event.

Trello Enterprise does more than project management

Many of us have experienced Trello’s project management power. But what about selling consumer goods?

With the right combination of templates, integrations, and team members, Trello users can create customized sales boards that can manage almost any retail initiative—just in time for the holiday season.

Interested in using Trello’s powerful solutions for your customer goods or retail business? We’d love for you to check out our latest Trello Enterprise webinar which showcases best practices, demos, and examples by our Atlassian Customer Success team that can help optimize your team’s planning in the retail space. 

Winter is coming: get holiday-ready with Trello for retail