Sellercloud>
  • Products
    • Skustack
    • Skublox
    • 4D Scale
    • Shipbridge
    • Waytopay.me
    • Memaila
    • Turnstock
    • Exactship
    • Imagebridge
    • Quickbridge
    • Receivebridge
  • Features
    • Catalog
    • Inventory
    • Purchasing
    • Omnichannel
    • Orders
    • Accounting
    • Shipping
    • Reporting
    • Web service API
    • Warehouse management
    • Advanced features
  • Integrations
    • Channels
    • Shopping carts
    • Shipping partners
    • Vendors
    • Third-party logistics
    • Payment gateways
    • Repricers
    • Other
    • Apps by Sellercloud
  • Industries
    • Pet Supplies
    • Camping & Hunting Equipment
    • Building Supplies
    • Dental Equipment & Medical Supplies
    • Electrical Power Tools & Accessories
    • Home Security Alarms and Security Cameras
    • Beauty, Cosmetics & Face Creams
    • Arts & Crafts Supplies
    • Auto Spare Parts and Car Accessories
    • Home & Garden
    • Electronics
    • Consumer goods
    • Luxury goods
    • Apparel
    • Automotive
    • General merchandise
    • Industrial products and machinery
    • Health and pharmaceuticals
    • On demand custom merchandise
    • Jewelry
    • Watches
    • Flooring and rugs
  • Pricing
  • Resources
    • Blog
    • Press releases
    • Case studies
    • Courses
    • Help center
    • User forum
    • Webinars
  • Help center
  • Company
    • Our story
    • What we do
    • Success stories
    • Careers
Login
Request demo
Sellercloud>
  • Products
    • Skustack
    • Skublox
    • 4D Scale
    • Shipbridge
    • Waytopay.me
    • Memaila
    • Turnstock
    • Exactship
    • Imagebridge
    • Quickbridge
    • Receivebridge
  • Features
    • Catalog
    • Inventory
    • Purchasing
    • Omnichannel
    • Orders
    • Accounting
    • Shipping
    • Reporting
    • Web service API
    • Warehouse management
    • Advanced features
  • Integrations
    • Channels
    • Shopping carts
    • Shipping partners
    • Vendors
    • Third-party logistics
    • Payment gateways
    • Repricers
    • Other
    • Apps by Sellercloud
  • Industries
    • Pet Supplies
    • Camping & Hunting Equipment
    • Building Supplies
    • Dental Equipment & Medical Supplies
    • Electrical Power Tools & Accessories
    • Home Security Alarms and Security Cameras
    • Beauty, Cosmetics & Face Creams
    • Arts & Crafts Supplies
    • Auto Spare Parts and Car Accessories
    • Home & Garden
    • Electronics
    • Consumer goods
    • Luxury goods
    • Apparel
    • Automotive
    • General merchandise
    • Industrial products and machinery
    • Health and pharmaceuticals
    • On demand custom merchandise
    • Jewelry
    • Watches
    • Flooring and rugs
  • Pricing
  • Resources
    • Blog
    • Press releases
    • Case studies
    • Courses
    • Help center
    • User forum
    • Webinars
  • Help center
  • Company
    • Our story
    • What we do
    • Success stories
    • Careers
Login
Request demo
logo
Request demo
  • Products
    • Skublox
    • Skustack
    • Waytopay.me
    • Memaila
  • Features
    • Catalog
    • Inventory
    • Purchasing
    • Omnichannel
    • Orders
    • Accounting
    • Shipping
    • Reporting
    • Web service API
    • Warehouse management
    • Advanced features
  • Integrations
    • Channels
    • Shopping carts
    • Shipping partners
    • Vendors
    • Third-party logistics
    • Payment gateways
    • Repricers
    • Other
    • Apps by Sellercloud
  • Industries
    • Furniture and home goods
    • Electronics
    • Consumer goods
    • Luxury goods
    • Apparel
    • Automotive
    • General merchandise
    • Industrial products and machinery
    • Health and pharmaceuticals
    • On demand custom merchandise
    • Jewelry
    • Watches
  • Pricing
  • Resources
    • Blog
    • Press releases
    • Courses
    • Help center
    • User forum
    • Webinars
  • Company
    • Our story
    • What we do
    • Success stories
    • Careers
Apps by SellercloudGeneral TipsSkustack

5 Ways to Save Money by Taking Care of Your Inventory

February 25, 2021

Being a successful e-commerce business means paying attention to a host of listings, marketplaces, inventories, and fulfillment workflows all at the same time. Adding to the challenge is the fact that selling online is a constantly evolving experience. As a result, the more agile and strategic you are in your decision making, the greater your potential for success. Making routine, purposeful adjustments across your entire business can result in huge savings – which, in turn, can mean larger profits.

One area that is particularly ripe for optimization is how you handle your inventory. Poor inventory management can wind up costing you big. In contrast, making smart moves about things like warehousing, carrying costs, record keeping, and real-time inventory tracking can reduce your overall cost of goods sold (COGS) and increase your profit margins.

Here are 5 of our favorite recommendations for saving money by being smart about your inventory:

1. Eliminate dead stock and expired products

Paying carrying costs on inventory that can’t or won’t sell is pure waste. Whether it’s damaged merchandise, returned products, out-of-date stock, expired goods, or items that simply aren’t selling (regardless of how many times you reprice them), paying to store this inventory in your warehouse is costing you money.

The first challenge is recognizing that this dead stock exists in the first place. Regular inventory audits can help to prevent these unsellable products from hiding in the cobwebs (more on this later).

The second challenge is locating and removing the offending merchandise. If you use multiple and/or offsite warehousing locations (like with FBA or a 3PL provider), you may not have easy access to actually hunt for these space-wasters yourself. It is up to you whether it is worth paying to have this inventory located and returned to you, or if you’re better off giving the go-ahead to have it destroyed.

Amazon has specific protocols for issuing a remove inventory order, as do most marketplaces and 3PL providers. When entrusting your warehousing to third-parties, be sure to know what these inventory procedures are and how to initiate them.

2. Avoid losses caused by damaged products

If your e-commerce business sells fragile merchandise, it is important to make warehousing and shipping decisions that account for these unique types of products. You need to be sure the entire fulfillment process, from warehouse to customer, includes the required degree of handling care to get your products to their destinations safely and in one piece. This may come with added costs, but in the end, maintaining overall customer satisfaction needs to be a high priority – particularly for third-party marketplace sellers.

Sure, shipping insurance can help offset the financial ramifications of damaged goods, but it also places a burden on customers to document and report issues. Customers are expecting their orders to arrive in perfect condition; they aren’t expecting to receive broken products and then have to spend their time filing claims (and/or waiting for a replacement to ship).

3. Stop storing more than necessary

Just as carrying costs on unsellable merchandise drive up your COGS, so does carrying too much merchandise.

Bulk purchasing and production can seem like cost-effective business decisions, but oftentimes sellers overlook the cost of storing these large quantities of inventory. Optimizing the inventory quantities you are holding according to your typical rate of sellthrough can prevent unnecessary storage and warehousing fees. In addition, proper automated inventory reporting (like the cycle counting features offered by the Skustack WMS) can help ensure that you are set to reorder new merchandise at precisely the right moment to keep your listings live and avoid “out of stock” messages – or worse, oversold merchandise.

Another option is to make the transition from third-party sales to first-party drop-shipping. This arrangement allows you to serve as a vendor to popular marketplaces like Target, Walmart, Amazon, Wayfair, or Kohls without actually carrying any inventory yourself. What’s more, Sellercloud offers Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) integrations that allow sellers of all sizes to expand into this unique flavor of e-commerce.

4. Do regular audits

Taking manual inventory counts isn’t fun, but for serious e-commerce businesses, there’s no way around it. From time to time, your business needs to prioritize a hard-count of the products you have on hand. These audits should be purposeful, consistent in practice, and supervised to help eliminate the potential for human error.

While there is a definite labor cost involved with inventory audits, this typically outweighs the costs associated with inconsistent inventory data. When your financial and inventory data are out of sync, you expose your company to a variety of problems and liabilities.

From a record-keeping standpoint, your inventory is likely a large portion of your business’s worth. You need to be confident that, at any given moment, you can report on this value truthfully and accurately.

Furthermore, you need to be able to know when the stock of products you are actively selling online need to be replenished. When counts are low, the corresponding listings need to either be updated accordingly or temporarily paused to prevent overselling issues. Having to cancel orders due to an inability to fulfill them hurts your standing with customers and marketplaces. When these errors become commonplace, it raises a red flag that could result in marketplace suspensions or even account terminations.

5. Use a reliable WMS system 

A dependable warehouse management system (WMS) can eliminate many of the headaches associated with inventory management. Our patented solution, Skustack, has been designed from the ground up with e-commerce merchants in mind.

Skustack is particularly helpful for e-commerce businesses selling across multiple marketplaces. Every piece of inventory can be tracked by a number of identifiers such as serial numbers, lot numbers, expiration dates, and/or location.

As a result, inventory tracking, order picking, managing RMA requests, cycle counting, and PO receiving can all be reliably simplified with Skustack. Whether your inventory is in a warehouse down the hall or spread across fulfillment centers worldwide (or some combination of both), Skustack helps you be sure that you know what stock you have, where it is, and that you can manage it. Contact us directly for more on how Skustack can become your all-in-one e-commerce WMS.

Spread the love
     

Ready to see how Sellercloud can supercharge your business? Schedule a demo today!

AboutThe Sellercloud Team
The Sellercloud team is dedicated to providing you with insights and content that can help guide your business strategy in a meaningful way. With 10+ years in the e-commerce space, our goal is to share our knowledge and ideas with you to help you achieve your business goals.
The Time is Right to Expand Your Omnichannel E-Commerce InternationallyThe Time is Right to Expand Your Omnichannel E-Commerce InternationallyFebruary 18, 2021
8 Best SEO Strategies for Boosting Your Brand’s E-Commerce TrafficMarch 4, 20218 Best SEO Strategies for Boosting Your Brand’s E-Commerce Traffic
Search
Blog categories
  • E-commerce News and Tips
    • Ecommerce Industry
    • General Tips
  • Features
    • Shipping
    • Website
  • Integrations
    • Amazon
      • Fulfilled By Amazon (FBA)
    • eBay
    • Google Shopping Actions
    • Jet
    • Magento
    • Tophatter
    • Walmart
    • Zapier
  • Apps by Sellercloud
    • Skublox
    • Skustack
    • Shipbridge
    • Memaila
Recent Posts
  • How to Reduce Your E-Commerce Cost Per Unit and Increase Profits
    How to Reduce Your E-Commerce Cost Per Unit and Increase Profits
    June 22, 2022
  • Know When Commercial Shipping Is a Better Option Than Parcel Shipping
    Know When Commercial Shipping Is a Better Option Than Parcel Shipping
    June 16, 2022
  • Can You Recognize the Perfect Reasons and Times to Remove FBA Inventory?
    Can You Recognize the Perfect Reasons and Times to Remove FBA Inventory?
    June 15, 2022
  • Effective Inventory Markdown Pricing Can Boost Profits and Cut Losses
    Effective Inventory Markdown Pricing Can Boost Profits and Cut Losses
    June 10, 2022
Archives
  • June 2022
  • May 2022
  • April 2022
  • March 2022
  • February 2022
  • January 2022
  • December 2021
  • November 2021
  • October 2021
  • September 2021
  • August 2021
  • July 2021
  • June 2021
  • May 2021
  • April 2021
  • March 2021
  • February 2021
  • January 2021
  • December 2020
  • November 2020
  • October 2020
  • September 2020
  • August 2020
  • July 2020
  • June 2020
  • May 2020
  • April 2020
  • March 2020
  • February 2020
  • January 2020
  • December 2019
  • November 2019
  • October 2019
  • September 2019
  • August 2019
  • July 2019
  • June 2019
  • March 2019
  • February 2019
  • January 2019
  • December 2018
  • November 2018
  • October 2018
  • August 2018
  • July 2018
  • May 2018
  • April 2018
  • December 2017
  • November 2017
  • October 2017
  • September 2017
  • August 2017
  • July 2017
  • June 2017
  • May 2017
  • March 2017
  • February 2017
  • November 2016
  • October 2016
  • March 2016

Learn best practices for online selling from our elite e-commerce specialists.

Facebook Instagram Linkedin YouTube Twitter
Get the latest blog articles



© Sellercloud® 2010 -