Most online sellers are scared of the idea of inventory. And that’s because of the issues one has to face in selling online. Storing inventory, keeping a check on it from time to time as well as replenishing it takes a lot of efforts. Even if you have an inventory management software, it will take more than just a tool to manage the inventory of a large business efficiently. But, things become a bit easy with tips and tricks in inventory management for eCommerce business.
Inventory management in eCommerce business is mandatory fornay business. Just because you think that you are a small business it doesn’t mean that inventory management doesn’t apply to you. Regardless of your business size, inventory management is fundamentally important for your business.
This is because the foundation of every big business lies in its stones that were laid at the time of its youth. If you’re a young business and not adopting the best practices for your inventory, chances are that you will scale to repeat the same mistakes again.
Inventory management for eCommerce business brings value to your online business and helps it flourish. It takes care of the little details about your inventory that keeps an account of it. While you’re busy making decisions for your business, inventory management ensures that your inventory is in excellent condition as always.
Inventory Management for e-commerce Business
Inventory management is the act of measuring the pricing, amount, mix of product, and location available from the business. E-Commerce inventory management helps the industry to know what products are in stock, understock, overstock, and out of stock. Management of inventory is closely tied to the financials of the company. Correct control over the list given in any large warehouse provides the business with a view of the revenue potential from every single pallet.
Inventory management analytics and logistics place a large part. The number of products maintained in the stock notify us about the fluctuating customer demands, purchasing trends, and seasonal trends.
Benefits of Inventory Management for eCommerce Business
Disturbance in inventory management can harm your business:- if you are selling products at the rate in which you can’t fulfill relationships, you want to build with your customers and suppliers. The relationship might get damaged as the customer is anticipating the product in time and not getting their product.
Fixing mistakes associated with inventory management can cost business:- both in terms of deadstock and lost revenue from sales. Your business will gain an advantage with more intelligence around buying behavior if you get your inventory management strategy right.
Systematic Business Practices
The warehouse workers take a lot of time to learn about an order before the revolution of the digital industry to determine the items in an order in which they were stored and items packed for shipment. But now it lives digitally and doesn’t use a lot of labor hours, which helps manage inventory.
If there are mistakes in the system or pieces of stock that are not accounted for, it creates problems for the warehouse. It saves time, and you can get more value out of your team if you have a sound inventory management system.
Keeping an Eye on Inventory
One warehouse containing only one product may be the strategy for some. Still, large businesses or the businesses that anticipate the exponential growth need to have a plan in place if they add other products into their catalog. When companies opt for multiple warehouses, especially when it involves the cross border shipping, this complexity increases the decuple. The ECommerce inventory management system provides you the information about where the product is and alerts you when the product is low in stocks or out of stock. An inventory management system provides deep visibility into the multiple warehouses near or far from each other for easier management of warehouses.
Delighting Every Customer
Your ECommerce website displays the product in stock chosen by the customer. Still, in actual, it turns out that it’s not available, then this creates a disunite user experience for the shopper.
You will be more aligned with the expectation that customers have around product availability if you have more accurate inventory management. This applies to the businesses that sell multiple channels, let Amazon and brick-and-mortar. As orders are being placed across the channels in real-time, it’s essential to know the final count of your inventory.
Elimination of Waste Inventory and Deadstock
If you have a rush of product, then there will be a risk that you will not be able to effectively sell all of it. Reporting such as FBA reports or historical sales reports gives the user data about how to make a better purchase decision so that they don’t risk wasted inventory in the first place. They feel confident and prepared to make accurate, reorder decisions based on the sales data.
Moreover, the inventory management system gives you a track record about running out of the products, and the products you have in inventory are near the end of their shelf life. This helps in eliminating the need for extra storage costs. Considering the addition of the “sales” section to your website or display of markdowns on the product pages helps shoppers incite the purchase.
Higher Returning Customers
Often a shopper wants to return the website and makes the same product purchase again from the user experience. An effective inventory management system paired with an e-commerce platform’s login capabilities or paired with invoicing helps the user get their order history quickly.
In combination with the email marketing partners, big E-Commerce stores can easily for market campaigns and create an email that revolves around purchasing the product.
Inventory Management in eCommerce: Best Tools to Your Rescue
Now that you’re well aware of the tools in inventory management, it is best that you start using tools to your rescue. Tools for inventory management in eCommerce help in making all these tasks easier and convenient. In other words, you get to concentrate on your business, while your nuanced tasks are taken care of. We’ve gone ahead and picked the best tools that you can use for your online business. Take a look below-
NetSuite
If you’ve ever searched about the best inventory management tools, you must have come across NetSuite. NetSuite is a powerful tool that helps in inventory management in eCommerce. It is suitable for businesses of all shapes and sizes. In addition to this, you can also use Netsuite as a cloud based inventory system. It helps in bringing the A to Z of a business’ inventory on a single platform. The best feature of Netsuits is that it has a multilingual support as well as forecasting and order management. Additionally, if you’re looking for a fully responsive, supply chain management tool that also has multi-currency features available, Netsuite is the best option for you.
Zoho Inventory
Zoho Inventory is yet another tool that manages your inventory management in eCommerce most efficiently. Both Netsuite and Zoho are neck to neck competitors for the category. So, you can go with either of them, depending upon your features. Zoho is a more tightly integrated inventory management application that also has a suite of other apps. It helps in creating sales and managing inventory reports easily. Moreover, it is also a CRM software that you can use for your business with a free setup assistance.
Ecomdash
Next in the list of eCommerce platforms is Ecomdash. If you compare it to the above two tools, you’ll find it fairly simple. In other words, it offers an interface to manage your inventory effectively along with the orders as well as the shipments from the same admin panel. It is suited to small and mid sizes inventories. If you’re looking for integrations such as Woocommerce, Shopify, Amazon, eBay and more, you can find that at eComdash. Using the tool you can also set custom alerts, map product SKU and do more.
Cin7
It is an automated tool for inventory management in eCommerce. Cin7 offers quite specific features depending upon the inventory of your business. It easily syncs a variety of online channels, POS systems as well as 3Pl integrations effortlessly. It has more than a few features that are more suitable for startups and medium sized organizations. One of the biggest advantages of using this tool is that it provides sellers with real-time tracking information about their inventories. Apart from the forecasting and kitting feature. Cin7 also has backorder management and higher stock visibility.
Fishbowl
Fishbowl is again one of the most popular inventory management tools. The brand lives up to its reputation across the world and provides features like multi-channel inventory syncing. Integrations for WooCommerce, Shopify. Amazon and more. In addition to this, it also provides demand forecasting for your inventory. So, that you can stay prepared with ample stock and never lose a sale opportunity.
Conclusion
Inventory management for eCommerce is a complex job. But if you know it’s benefits and use the right tools, it becomes an easy affair. Similarly, when it comes to your inventory, you must also make sure that you use the best in class delivery solution like Dash101. Ship to 26000+ Pin codes at the lowest rates. Integrate your Shopify account and ship seamlessly with 8+ courier partners.
