The Guide to Inventory Management for E-commerce Stores

One of the major challenges any new e-commerce business faces is managing their inventory. How much stock of a product should I acquire? How much should I spend on storage? These are just a couple of the questions you’ll be plagued with regarding inventory. Inventory management does involve the right kind of technology to be used to help you manage it.

But apart from that you need to make some good decisions regarding acquiring and managing your inventory. Take a look at what you need to do below.

Stocking up on what people want to buy

You may have already decided what you want to sell on your store. But before you just run out and buy them, stop. Ask yourself if what you want to sell to customers is something they’d want to buy.

• Do some research on what your customers are searching for. If you’re planning to sell apparel do some research on what clothing customers are looking for. Maybe it’s winter so they’re looking for fleece lines jackets, or leather boots.
• Tools like SEM Rush and Google Keyword Planner help you analyse what users are searching for. Accordingly you can stock up on these particular products. You can also research related products and see if you can acquire them for your store.

How much stock should you bring in?

Okay so the first thing to do is zero in on your competitors and see what products they don’t have available. Of course they need to be popular products that have run out of stock on your competitor’s site. Or stock that’s not easily available but can be monetized.

• If you’re planning to sell perishable goods that come with an expiration date, you need to take the usage period into consideration. Selling stuff past expiry can land you in severe consequences. Make sure you buy goods that well before the expiry date and can be stored for a while until they’re sold.
• You should also pay attention to seasonal purchases. For example if summer is around the corner, you should consider stocking up on pairs of shorts, crop tops, and beachwear that will be in demand.

Choosing the right time to acquire products

It’s time to study you suppliers. You already probably know who’s going to supply what to you but you’ll have to research better now.

• Create a list of where all your suppliers are located, how their taxes are applied, their delivery charges and the T&C they levy on the supply.
• Also make sure you research the history of quality provided by different suppliers. Maintain a record of product info with weight, colors size an product description included.

Analyzing your stock and sales movement

So this is the hard part. Sales are perpetually changing and it will be hard to keep track of what to stock up on? There are some throughout the year best sellers and there are ones that sell just during certain periods. Also a change in economic policies or even sudden climactic or political changes suddenly increases the demand of your goods.

• It’s pretty tough job but you will have to estimate what products are worth restocking. Are they eating into your profits? You’ll have to evaluate if by restocking those products you’re actually able to cover the costs of shipping and delivery.
• Here a helpful little trick is to keep a ‘get notified when stock is available’ button on your e-commerce store. So that when you do decide to restock on a particular product, automatic notifications are sent to every customer who was interested in the product and wanted to buy it.

Okay. You might probably be worried about inventory management after learning the difficulties you’ll encounter and the number of tough decisions you’ve got to take. Taking the decision is part of running an e-commerce store or any business for that matter.

But you can make the process of managing your inventory a lot easier with the right software. The J2Store e-commerce plugin helps you with this. You can keep track of your inventory , the products in stock, and easily manage stock for product variations . The intuitive interface is easy to use by anyone. You can also choose to get notified when stock runs low . Your customers can choose to get notified when products back in stock. Customers can also reorder products from their order history.

Next up: Learn know how to price your products.