As an eCommerce business owner, you know you have to keep several balls in the air to ensure that your company is successful. While this may seem daunting, it is so exciting when you see your business become successful.
You probably need a few hints and tips to help keep your organization moving forward, so today we are providing a few tips to optimize inventory management for your eCommerce business.
What is Inventory Management?
Simply stated, inventory management is the process that keeps track of product inventory and includes steps such as:
- Ordering
- Storing
- Selling
In our current world with multi-channel communications that allow customers to order through many different touch points, large companies use inventory management software. However, inventory control and management is important to companies of any size.
All eCommerce business owners will encounter challenges concerning inventory management at some time. Understanding the challenges and how to deal with them is what will set you apart from your competition.
Understanding your inventory system from top to bottom is crucial to success; as such, you need to know:
- What to reorder
- When to reorder
- Quantities
- How long your product will sit in the warehouse
- …much, much more.
Here are some great tips to optimizing your inventory management:
Implement a management solution that uses real-time data — Implementing software that can provide an accurate, real-time view of your inventory at all times can ease the burdens of inventory management. You should use programs that allow real-time data processing, as well as being centralized, to allow all team members to help ensure your inventory is at its proper levels at all times. The centralized management of your inventory can help you:
- Create accurate forecasts of your needs
- Optimize your levels of stock
- Automate restocking orders to eliminate expensive last minute orders
Implement automation solutions, along with other third-party solutions — This is actually two-pronged — First, automation tools can provide feedback and insights to streamline inventory management. Second, third-party services/software can help you determine the best choices between competing suppliers, which will improve your overall efficiency.
Stay on top of the entire supply chain — Previously, suppliers would work independently with few updates available. Today, the opposite is happening — manufacturers are delivering real-time updates, such as location of stock, delivery information and such.
As you can see, one of the most important assets to optimized inventory management is having real-time information at your fingertips. Not only will optimizing and automating your inventory management make your job just a bit easier, but it will also in essence save you money!
With software implementation, including using packages such as InfinitySync, to automate and streamline your entire inventory process, you will soon see the benefits and success arise within all aspects of your eCommerce business. Please call us if you would like any additional information or tips to optimize inventory management for your eCommerce business!
