Importance of inventory management:
Every holiday season stutters in with it’s own share of expectations, anticipations as well as headaches for eCommerce website owners. Headaches? Yes, you read it right. What else would you call that sticky situation, when the inability to manage product inventory effectively clashes with a great wave of demands from customers?
Well, as eCommerce website owners, we’ve all been there before, and wouldn’t want to be in such a situation…even in our worst dreams! Even big fishes in the eCommerce industry have been victims of poor inventory management, in the past (remember the Flipkart Big Billion Day sales tragedy?).
Check out these tips…and for sure, you can look forward to a great holiday season…with sales like never before and happy customers everywhere:
Tips:
1) Learn from the past: Gather data from your past sales records, and plan your inventory management techniques accordingly. You can also extract the sales data of your competitors and decide effective inventory management strategies based on it. This will help you to get an in depth idea on what kind of products to stock, how much to stock, for how long to stock and how to manage returns inventory etc…since you will have a clear view of the customers’ trends.
2) Understand the pulse of your customers properly…and market your products according to it. Well executed marketing campaigns for apt products will ensure that you will be able to sell off your products easily.
3) Don’t ignore technology: Yes, there are many tools and eCommerce inventory management systems available, which can help you to streamline the processes of tracking, packing, shipping, and managing products…and thus take away the heavy load of manual execution off your head. Automating all such processes using integrated systems will help you to get the task of effective inventory management done, quickly and swiftly. One such tool which you can depend upon is MercuryMinds’s ecommerce inventory management system.
4) Out of stock items does no good to your sales: So avoid making tall claims and promises of items which you can’t deliver. If possible, try to stock in all the ‘most in demand’ items…so that the customers never leave your online holiday shopping store with a grumpy face and empty hands. So the bottom line is…do your best to stock up on what sells.
5) Returns inventory: Analyze all the possible reasons which cause returns of products…and avoid them. There could be many reasons such as faulty products, ineffective shipping, inconsistent product description, wrong sizing etc. Communicate your concerns regarding such aspects with the manufacturers, suppliers etc and nip the problem of returns in the bud itself. And if at all you happen to have some returned products in your inventory…worry not! Just try outsourcing them to fulfillment partners, who can sell them off easily.
So, go on…happy inventory management!