Managing an online store has a lot of moving parts. And a huge part of it is about managing your inventory so that products are readily available for timely delivery to the customers while ensuring they don’t expire in your warehouse itself.
Simply put, you need to ensure efficient inventory management. Here’s why…
Why Is Cloud Management Important?
- Minimize storage costs by having EOQ (Economic Order Quantity) that weighs the cost of storing your products as compared to the cost of ordering those products
- With proper inventory management, you can improve cash flow by investing money in inventory that sells fast.
- Minimizes losses by keeping a track of aging inventory and the number of items you should stock for each category based on projections.
Here are a few quick tips to improve inventory management and boost your online sales.
Cloud Management Best Practices to Boost Online Sales
1. Check Order History
How many units did you order last time? How many did you end up selling? Keeping a track of your order history helps you find your Economic Order Quantity (EOQ) and ensures that you don’t end up ordering too much or ordering too little. It’s the perfect quantity that will help you reduce costs and maximize profits.
2. Use Bundling Technique
You can bundle fast-moving items with less popular products. This way, you can sell off products that are going to be in excess/obsolete soon. For example, suppose your body care kit isn’t selling that much while your hair care kit is popular. Bundling both of them and offering a discount incentivizes the customer and it keeps your body care inventory moving.
3. Run Offers for Aging Inventory
You can even choose to run offers on aging inventory alone. These offers need not be restricted to just discounts. You can have offers such as BOGO (Buy One Get One), have bulk deals such as “Buy 3, Get 1 free,” and so on.
4. Organize The Inventory by Category
Not only does this help your warehouse workers know exactly where things are but you can easily keep a track of what’s selling most in which category, which product requires offers, which product needs to be shipped fast, and so on.
5. Minimize Shortages
Suppose you have some products that are selling the most via your international shipping option. What if you suddenly face a shortage of these products? Your customers may probably run to another online store. To avoid that, you can make use of demand forecasting, keep safety stock, and improve lead time accuracy.
6. Outsourcing
You can outsource your entire logistics and fulfillment services to a Third-Party Logistics (TPL) Provider. You can gain their expertise and reduce inefficiencies in your inventory management system.
7. Scanning System Implementation
An inventory scanner system consists of a barcode scanner that automates and streamlines your inventory management process. With almost 97% of consumers wanting the ability to track their orders online and receive communication updates, a barcode inventory system makes that possible.
Conclusion
All in all, your inventory is an asset you need to protect. Implementing proper inventory management practices thus becomes crucial for your business not only to boost online sales but reduce inefficiencies and cut down unnecessary costs.
With these seven best practices, you are all set to realize more online sales with lower costs.
Author Bio
Oliver Thyra is the head SaaS copywriter and content strategist at Your Marketing Digest. His intense passion for marketing and his engineering background in software engineering has made him a guy who understands how to sell software subscriptions with words. In his free time, Oliver enjoys quality time with his pets (he has got 4 golden retrievers!).