INVENTORY MANAGEMENT: SOLUTION FOR ECOMMERCE STORES

Posted by Quick Shift on April 26th, 2019

If you’ve ever worked in a retail store, inventory management most likely gives you flashbacks to back storerooms loaded up with stock being checked by hand. In any case, with the ascent of e-commerce business, inventory management is growing from brick-and-mortar to digital.

From storing inventory in a carport or storm cellar to outsourcing or leasing warehousing solutions, it’s basic to deal with the procedure precisely, proficiently, and cost-effectively. In the event that you don’t, you risk losing cash or missing to satisfy client need.

Managing inventory strategically has never been progressively critical, and it just gets all the more testing as you develop in both product development and units sold. Peruse on to figure out how to remain over the inventory management process.

WHAT IS INVENTORY MANAGEMENT?

Inventory management refers to the control and checking of a company stocked products. Inventory management is needed for both online and physical organizations and incorporates requesting and restocking stock, storing inventory, modifying recurrence, request amount, and inventory forecasting.

1. It Ensures You Never Run Out Of Stock

Part of inventory management is making sense of how much inventory you should have available consistently. An excessive amount of stock and you risk ‘dead stock’: inventory that can never again be sold due to being out-of-date. Excessively little, and you’ll come up short on stock, neglect to fulfill client needs, and pass up potential deals.

By building up reorder focuses, you can guarantee that you watch out for your inventory with the goal that it doesn’t plunge underneath a basic dimension. (More on this later.)

2. It Helps You Save Money On Storage

Too much inventory can result in a lot of cash spent on storage space. Storing inventory is a variable cost it depends on how much space your inventory occupies at some random time. When you have more product on hand than you need, you end up paying more for storage. Being savvy about inventory levels can enable you to reallocate those funds.

3. It Prepares You For The Unexpected

It pays to be prepared. Do you realize what you’d do if any of the accompanying inventory network accidents occurred tomorrow?

• You unexpectedly sell out of a product
• You misunderstand your storage needs and run out of space
• Incoming inventory from the maker is postponed
• You keep running into an income issue and can’t buy more inventory

Strategic inventory management can enable you to escape these tight spots. The following inventory over some time and having alternate plans of action set up for potential stock issues will set you up for situations that would some way or another genuinely sway your business.

4. It Shows Trends In Customer Behavior

Keeping track of what inventory sells like hotcakes versus what winds up shrouded in metaphorical webs can share some essential understanding about what your clients are and aren’t into. You can likewise check the success of earlier promotions or item dispatches by evaluating inventory dimensions when those occasions.

5. It Helps You Track Costs Of Goods Sold

Inventory accounting is the point at which you track and record for changes in the estimation of inventory over time as it relates to manufacturing and costs of goods sold. On the off chance that you don’t have a precise strategy for monitoring the estimation of your inventory, you can’t properly esteem your benefits or merchandise sold and spending plan for the stock you have to purchase for your business.

TECHNIQUES AND METHODS

Set Reorder Points

Also called par levels, reorder focuses are the base amount of every product that must be on hand at all times in order to prevent stockouts. At the point when your inventory levels dip under the reorder points, it’s a great opportunity to arrange more products from your maker.

To calculate reorder focuses on your items, including the accompanying:

• Your manufacturer’s lead time for sending inventory to your fulfillment location.
• Your satisfaction provider’s accepting turnaround time (if applicable)
• A suggested “safety stock” of at least 14  days in case of a sudden demand spike

At that point, multiply the sum of 1, 2, and 3 by your regular units of the product sold every day. This number is your reorder point.

Although it requires some math forthright, setting reorder focuses will help streamline and remove the guess from restocking stock.

Ensure that you check your reorder focuses after some time and straighten out as important, particularly before pinnacle conditions such as the occasions when you’re probably going to require progressively stock close by.

The FIFO Approach

“First-in, first-out,” otherwise known as FIFO, is an inventory rule that implies that your most established inventory gets sold and dispatched out. This is particularly vital in case you’re selling transitory items or those with lapse dates.

Regardless of whether your merchandise is rack stable, FIFO can even now be a decent system. Since bundling, structure and marking, and item includes will in general change after some time, it’s vital to change out stock so you don’t finish up with old items.

If you’re storing inventory and satisfying buy arranges in-house, you’ll need to screen this physically. In case you’re redistributing to a third-party logistics  (3PL) supplier, they’ll likely have the capacity to actualize a FIFO framework for you.

Regularly Audit Your Inventory

While evaluating physical inventory is regularly monotonous, it’s essential to check the actual inventory level against the measure of stock you have recorded electronically. On the off chance that you work with an outside supplier, you’ll presumably be depending on their product framework and answering to monitor inventory levels. However, it’s essential to ensure that the system’s numbers coordinate with your physical stock.

Spot checking can be an increasingly sensible approach to monitor inventory reviews in the middle of full physical inventory audits. This implies picking a particular item, checking the number of units close by, and contrasting it with the number of units recorded in the framework. This is particularly useful on the off chance that you have an extensive item index with loads of various SKUs. Stock administration innovation can help disentangle this procedure by provoking a spot check when the framework denotes the item stock as zero.

In the wake of checking your inventory levels, it’s important to have consistently refreshed reinforcements of this information. This can be as straightforward as sending out the information from your stock administration programming to a CSV record in any event once every week. Also, you can set up programmed reinforcements of the stock dimensions given in your online business stage utilizing applications like this one.

Maintain a Relationship With Your Suppliers

Choosing the correct maker is a gigantic advance for developing organizations to locate the most financially savvy and productive accomplice that can help raise development. Be that as it may, finding the correct provider for your business is only the start. Keeping up a decent association with your maker will guarantee they’re an accomplice in inventory management instead of a deterrent.

Make a point to discuss every now and again with your maker, particularly when you’re foreseeing an expansion in deals or they’re running behind calendar on creation.

On the off chance that you have stock quality issues, an item that won’t sell, an item that sells out more rapidly than foreseen, or whatever other circumstance that calls for creation changes, having a decent association with your provider will enable your supply to chain run all the more easily.

Use Inventory Management Software

Software that is specifically designed to enable you to deal with your inventory, regardless of whether in-house or in a 3PL’s warehouse, can help abstain from losing cash from unsold items, report on inventory level and patterns continuously, and offer proposals for inventory distribution. It can likewise help computerize a few of the methods above, sparing time and potential human mistakes for your business.

In the End, Inventory management influences each part of a business’ tasks. Selecting the correct inventory management and systems can enable your business to save money, satisfy client need, and remain productive and powerful in the quick-moving ecommerce landscape.