You don’t want to be in a bind when your target customers place an order and you don’t have the products to deliver. For them to keep buying your brand’s products, your customers want the best customer service from your business. It is important to keep an inventory of your products to make sure that when customers place an order, they will be of good quality and available.
What Is Inventory Control?
It all comes down to where you get your products, how you store them, and how you sell them. Keeping an inventory helps you make sure that your products are available and in good shape before you sell them to customers.
Having a good inventory management system saves your ecommerce business time, money, and resources, and makes it easier to run.
Why Should You Keep Inventory
Customers will get their products faster. Since you know when your products are available and where they are, it will be easy to deliver them to customers who order them from your store.
Keep customers for as long as you can. Customers love companies that make great products that solve their problems. If you keep track of your inventory well, your products will be in good shape and customers will get them at the right time. It will help you build trust with your customers and increase the value of a customer over time.
Make sure orders are filled correctly. Since you already have products in stock, it will be easy to fill customer orders correctly. You will know what to pack, how much to pack, and not send the wrong thing. You can fill customer orders quickly and well, and your customers’ experiences with your brand will keep getting better. Keeping an inventory makes sure that your customers get what they order.
Better planning and stock item ordering. Managing your inventory helps you plan and store your items better. You know what goods you need at certain times and how to order them. Scannable barcodes on packages make it easy to keep track of the goods that are coming in.
Your warehouse should be better organized. Good inventory management will make it easy to make your warehouse look professional. With the right inventory management, it will be easy to plan and organize the goods in your warehouse so that they can be moved, planned, and ordered quickly when customers place orders. Radio Frequency Identification, for example, is used in large warehouses to help move a lot of products.
How to Keep Track of Inventory
Have a good relationship with your suppliers.
You want to make sure that your customers can always get the things they want. You need to take care of your relationship with your supplier to make sure that these products keep coming. Make sure you have good relationships with your suppliers so that your customers can always get what they need.
Organize your communications with your suppliers by putting them in emails and putting the emails in a spreadsheet. This will make it easy to keep track of any changes and get back in touch with your suppliers. Make sure you pay their bills on time and give them a great place to work so they can get you the products you need on time and in the right amount.
When your supplies are usually late or don’t match what you ordered, you can talk to them about the problem. If it keeps happening, you can look for other suppliers to work with for your online business. It is important to work out a deal with your suppliers.
First-in, first-out, or FIFO, means to sell old stock first.
It is important to sell your products in the order they come into your store, starting with the oldest items. When things are stored for a long time, they can go bad. For example, goods that go bad quickly, like flowers and food, can’t stay in stores for long. Even things that don’t go bad can lose value if you keep them in your store for too long because they can get broken and waste.
Take care of returns well
You need a way to check and keep track of the goods that come into your store. When you get products, you should carefully check the packages to make sure they have everything you ordered before putting them away.
When suppliers package or label the cases or boxes, they don’t always get it right. You don’t want customers to complain that products they bought weren’t checked in correctly when they placed their order.
There are some things that take a long time to sell. When goods stay in your store for a long time, it’s important to work out a return policy with the vendors.
Have Backup Suppliers
Even your best suppliers can have problems with delivery, and if they can’t get goods to you on time, it can hurt your business and your relationships with customers. Have a back-up supplier for your products in case your main supplier is late. You will make sure your customers get their goods on time and in good shape, which will keep them coming back to your business.
Dropshipping can be used.
You don’t have to keep stock if you use this method. When a customer buys something from your ecommerce store, you can fill their order for them by using drop shipping. You can find the best wholesale suppliers for your ecommerce business with the help of online tools like AliExpress. You can import the products that interest you through dropship-empire.com sites like Shopify or Wix that have integrations with dropship-empire.com. , your finished customer orders will show up.
Have Regular Stock Checks
It’s important to check your stock by hand. You can check your stock from time to time to see what you have. Make sure that all the information in your inventory tool matches what you have in your store.
Use the right tools for managing your stock
Your customers come first in your business. If your online store gives them a great experience, they will want to use it for a long time. The right inventory management tools in an e-commerce store make this possible.
If you use the right tools to make sure a steady flow of products to customers, the tool makes it easy to run your business and grow it.
Figure out the costs of marketing.
You don’t just want to keep stock in your online store; you also want to make money from it. You should be aware of all the costs that come with running your ecommerce business. It will help you figure out how much to charge your customers so that your business doesn’t lose money. Don’t forget that you are in business to make money, right?
Use past stock to guess what you’ll buy in the future
You’ve been in business for a while and sell different kinds of goods to different people. You know from our past customers which products sell faster, so it’s important to have those ready.
Make sure that your customers can always get these products when they need them. Make sure that these products are always available by telling your suppliers when you need them. You can predict and improve the demand for your products by using data and analytics.
Use the 80/20 rule to make a list.
The rule says that 20% of your stock is responsible for 80% of your business’s profits. It means 20% of the stock that sells the most and makes your business money every time. For your business to run smoothly, you need to know how long these hot items stay on the market.
For instance, you should know how many of these items sell every day, week, or month. This helps you make sure that your customers will always be able to get what they need. With this rule, you can set up reorder alerts for goods that move quickly to make sure you always have these most-used items on hand.
How to Measure KPIs for Inventory Management
Here are some key metrics you need to track as you run your e-commerce store and manage your inventory to keep your business growing.
Turnover of stock. This metric tells you how many times your inventory sells and is replaced in a certain amount of time, like a month or a year.
- Everything went exactly as planned. This KPI predicts how happy customers will be with the products your business sells. For example, you might not deliver the goods on time, or you might not deliver them as the customer expected, or you might not do what the customer asked for. These hurt your perfect order performance metric.
- Time Between Orders. It measures how long it takes between when a customer places an order and when it is delivered. The metric helps businesses figure out how well they are managing their production and supply chain to serve customers.
- Days of Sales of Stock. It tells you how long it will take for your stock to be sold. Here is how to figure out this measurement.
- Costs of Carrying. The metric tells you how much it costs to store your goods for a certain amount of time. It helps you figure out how much to sell your goods for so that you don’t lose money. When you carry costs, you cut down on maintenance costs and make more money for your business. KPI is easy to track.
Last Words
If you want your customers to be happy and your business to keep growing, you need to have products to sell whenever an order comes in. Managing your inventory well will help make sure that your customers always have access to the goods they need. Try these tips if you’ve been having trouble keeping track of your inventory or if you want to make sure your inventory management system works well.