Success in online retail depends on a lot of factors. You’ve got your clients, suppliers, marketing, advertising, and one other very important aspect, your inventory. More specifically, the way you manage your inventory. Order fulfillment issues can spell disaster for your business. In fact, inventory management is one of the core elements that need to be structured properly alongside your retail site’s business management.
Order volumes are never consistent. Sometimes you get more sales coming in, and sometimes you get less. It can be tricky trying to gauge what the right amount of orders is all the time. This is why working with a reliable supplier is valuable because they have market and industry know-how to be able to give you precise information on when you can expect your stock turnover. For instance, thrive screen printing is one such supplier in the screen-printing business that ensures their customers receive updates on accurate and consistent delivery times. You need to do thorough research in your product niche to be able to find a reliable and good supplier that can fulfill the order demands of your business.
In order to meet the demand, you need to have inventory on hand at all times, so your customer satisfaction levels improve significantly and, along with it, your ratings as a seller. With customers expecting more and more out of businesses these days, having a well-managed inventory and a reliable supplier is now more crucial than it has ever been.
Inventory management goes beyond just making sure that you have enough stock on hand all the time as soon as the orders come in. Management in this context includes forecasting your sales, the volume of orders, cash flow, and sellers also need to maneuver the process of staying on top of search listings. This is why you also need a good inventory management strategy to help you juggle the order fulfillment issues and help you maintain the right stock levels so you’re never overstocked or understocked.
If you wanted to explore options to help you manage your inventory, these are some tools to use:
Brightpearl – This option helps you manage your orders, inventory, finances, and your customers all within one single system. The biggest benefit for sellers who are using this system would be the efficiency involved and their insight to help them accelerate both their profits and their growth. This is done through multi-channel retailing, both online and offline, accounting, and order management software. Brightpearl even office sellers the added convenience of integrating with other third-party systems, including the likes of Amazon, eBay promo, and Shopify, to make it even more convenient.
TradeGecko – As a powerful cloud-based platform that serves small and medium businesses, as well as business-to-business wholesalers, TradeGecko provides sellers with a multi-channel inventory and complete order management system. The experience you get with this option is highly personalized, and it is one of the best platforms out there that gives you options like order and inventory management, integrations and operations, analytics, reporting, and more.
Joelister – Assuming that you’re operating on eBay and Amazon FBA, Joelister is how you would easily and quickly fulfill and list your Amazon inventory on the eBay platform. This option offers sellers a one-click solution that will automatically populate all your eBay listings, complete with product info and description. It also syncs the quantities of your items between eBay and Amazon and automates the fulfillment process. Once you’ve sold an item on eBay and the payment has been successfully processed and received, Joelister passes the order along to Amazon to handle the shipping. As a bonus, this third-party management tool even helps you upload your tracking numbers and send them to eBay.
Restock Pro – Save time tracking your shipments and your inventory with this cloud-based management tool that could help you accelerate your business. Whether you are manually trying to fulfill orders from your own warehouse or you’re a seller on FBA, this platform lets you track your vital data related to inventory, help you streamline your operations, forecast your sales, manage your suppliers, create custom kits, and even print custom stickers.
Seller Active – This multi-channel listing manager offers sellers the convenience of efficiently helping you maximize your E-Commerce product reach. Boost your presence across numerous marketplace dominators like Amazon, Walmart, and eBay. Other Perks of this platform include being able to consolidate your orders for easy packing, shipment, and tracking. Seller Active uses helpful alerts and accurate reporting for real-time visibility into your orders, listings, and sales. Basically, you never have to worry about going out of stock or overselling. Sellers get to easily and conveniently build a centralized product catalog for themselves and for the convenience of their customers. You could upload your new listings in bulk across multiple channels and resolve any specific marketplace issues within a faster timeframe. If you are searching for the finest Walmart and Amazon FBA tools for sellers, try Helium 10, an easy-to-use tool that lets you fill your listings with numerous keywords.
Skubana – Another cloud-based management tool is Skuabana, and it has helped many entrepreneurs build a successful multi-channel E-Commerce business. With the 1-Click integration it offers for Shopify, Amazon, eBay, shopping carts, and other marketplaces, sellers get to leverage Skubana’s business intelligence and power. There is a catch, though. You need to be bringing in at least 1,000 orders monthly to do this. The platform believes that anything less than this specific number of orders means you’re wasting your time, and selling more means you are radically operating at unprecedented levels.
A little investment in one of these tools can make your online retail business much smoother. A good tool and a reliable supplier are among the foundations of a good business because it all translates to ensuring your customers get their products not only in the fastest delivery time possible, but they also receive their orders in good form- nothing broken, lost, or forgotten. These lead to higher customer satisfaction, which turns them into loyal customers, leading to higher sales volume. It’s all a cycle for business sustainability and profitability.