It isn’t just the holiday season but in regular days are more or less a chaos for most of the eCommerce website owner. They are over loaded with apprehensions, expectations and not to forget headache too. With never ending demands of customers and the inability to effectively manage the inventory is a constant struggle that has to be dealt with. Almost all the ecommerce website owners even the bigger names have gone through this situation. This actually shows how important it is to manage the inventory properly. Here, we are sharing some tips which might come handy:
- Learn from the past: Gather data from your past sales records, and plan your techniques for inventory management accordingly. By collecting the sales data of your competitors, you can decide effective inventory management strategies based on it. That way you will get an in depth idea on what kind of products you can stock, quantity that you need to stock, duration and managing inventory returns it.
- Know Your Customers – Get to the pulse of the customer and form strategies based on it. A campaign that is created and executed properly will make it easier to sell your products.
- Don’t ignore technology: Managing inventory isn’t a cake walk. There are so many procedures like packing, tracking, managing and shipping products which can be really confusing but with tools and good inventory management system being available; this lengthy and confusing procedure gets streamlined. So, nothing has to be done manually. Yes, there are many tools and eCommerce inventory management systems available which help in making the entire thing easier.
- Out of stock items does no good to your sales: One should always avoid making tall claims which later could become really troublesome to deliver. Try and keep a good stock of the items which are in high demand because customers returning sad and empty handed doesn’t leave a good impression.
- Returns inventory: It isn’t a very good feeling seeing returns but then there is nothing to be sad about it. One cannot avoid this situation. Though one can start paying more attention and do a thorough research on the various reasons which are responsible for it. Be it faulty products, wrong size or product description and issues in shipping etc. You can have a talk and present your concerns with the suppliers, manufacturers and reach to the root cause behind the issue. In extreme case if it still returns, send it to fulfillment partners who can sell it.
