Effective inventory management is the lifeblood of a profitable, sustainable & profitable eCommerce business. Regardless of your business size, complexity, or type of products you are selling, your warehouse’s poor management could hamper your long-term business progress.
Common Inventory Management Challenges Ecommerce Businesses Face & How to Fix Them
This article walks you through some common blunders associated with inventory handling for an eCommerce business and how smart inventory management software for ecommerce business empowers you to deal with them.
Scroll down and find out:-
1.Managing Multiple Channels & Warehouses
You presumably started with a single sales channel and warehouse for stocking your inventory. As your sales grew in numbers, so do your sales channels and the number of warehouses required to meet the escalating need for stock storage.
Manual tracking of more than one sales channels is exhausting and highly problematic. The solution is a centralized eCommerce inventory management system to keep a tap on multiple warehouse processing orders, how much inventory you are left with, and so much more.
You’ll save time, energy, and all the stress as the online inventory management system is doing all number crunching for you.
2. Overstocking & Understocking
Another major issue with eCommerce inventory management is overstocking & understocking.
Overstocking is a significant risk to your business’s bottom line; inventory getting dumped, and you’re not receiving any return. On the other hand, understocking puts you in a tight spot of not meeting market demand and losing potential sales revenue.
Avoid both, especially when the sales are seeing annual lows or highs. For instance, think about how your sales will be affected during the black Friday season if you understocked your best-selling products.
A dedicated eCommerce inventory management system alerts and reminds both the sales and warehouse management team when a particular item/brand falls under a predefined threshold and tells what items are present in abundance, so you can plan strategically.
3. Lack of Data Insights
Managing eCommerce inventory is one thing, and understanding & utilizing it to plan your business’s sales strategy is something else altogether.
Gathering and analyzing data manually is next to impossible, but you can certainly benefit from it if you automate your inventory.
For instance, with an online inventory management system, you’ll not only be aware of how much stock is left for a certain product in real-time but also helpful in knowing how the availability of a specific item fluctuates over some time, between warehouses, across channels, and other factors.
You can capitalize on time-sensitive opportunities or eCommerce trends by having deep insights into your business data.
4. Manual Documentation
The paperwork associated with an eCommerce business is complex, time-draining, and not secure if you do it manually. And, it becomes more challenging if you have multiple warehouses with lots of stock. This is where inventory management software comes into play; it automatically creates and manages invoices, purchase orders, and sales documents.
The cloud inventory management system also enables automated back-ups, authorizes access, and real-time celebration across warehouses.
Final Thoughts
As your eCommerce business expands, you probably think of investing in an inventory management system; before you finalize, you must ask yourself a few questions. Starting with, what type of products are you selling? What challenges are you facing with handling your inventory? How much can you spend on inventory management? And, finally, what software integrations do you require? The answers to these questions will guide you to choose the right software provider.