For many sellers out there, Amazon is the Holy Grail when it comes to eCommerce. And why not? The immense popularity of Amazon is reason enough for sellers to scurry towards its threshold. While starting on Amazon might turn out to be a convenient endeavor, sellers tend to ignore the challenges that come with inventory management in the platform.
Now, giving out a comprehensive piece of advice on how to efficiently manage inventory is quite easy for us. The real challenge is how you, as a seller, would execute it on your own. Inventory management might seem like an afterthought, but it is quite significant as even a slight mistake could spell disaster for your entire store. Even experienced sellers find inventory management to be an insufferable choir.
You can consider outsourcing Amazon product data entry services to relieve yourself of this crucial task. However, it is still imperative that you learn the crucial dos and don’ts of inventory management for smooth business operations.
Going Out of Stock on Amazon
Running out of stock while selling on an eCommerce store is the cardinal sin a seller can ever commit. The pernicious effects of such an oversight can be long-lasting and severely damaging. Your prospects might run over to competitor’s store, and never look back at yours, thus monumentally lowering your sales.
If you are out of stock for a longer than necessary time, then you will also see your store dropping in keyword rankings. Keyword rankings make your store visible to customers. With lower rankings, your store is as good as not existing at all.
Amazon also eliminates all of those product listings that are without stock from its search results. Although your product listings aren’t removed permanently, it still does harm your search visibility with potential customers.
Over-loading your Inventory
While going out of stock can result in you losing your customers, overloading on inventory can also be detrimental to your store. Having more products than necessary, or having obsolete inventory will harm the image of your store. Fulfillment by Amazon costs its sellers a long term storage fee of $3.45 per cubic foot of inventory. There are frequent inventory cleanups conducted by FBA. The inventory that has been sitting for around 181 to 365 days are the ones that incur these charges. Hence, it is simply better to only keep those inventories that are relevant to your store.
How Do You Plan Your Inventory?
We have talked about how both overstocking, and going out of stock are harmful to your Amazon store. So what you need to do is simply find a balance between the two aforementioned extremes.
- Be strategic in planning your inventory orders by carefully checking on lead time (The duration between the day you place the order to the day the item is ready for purchase) and anticipates sales regularly.
- Examine your historical sales data for inventory forecasting. In the absence of sufficient data for analysis, you can check your competitor’s sales trends to make the most accurate sales predictions. Keeping track of past sales estimates will provide you with valuable insights on how the products have performed in the past.
With past records now in your possession, you can accurately predict how the market will behave in the future.
Leverage Seller Central
Do leverage seller central to manage your inventory efficiently. It offers an array of free tools to help with your inventory management, allowing you to perform routine tasks like;
- View and sort inventory
- Create, copy, and edit listings
- Manage pricing
- Add and eliminate images
- Close and delete image
You are also frequently notified on re-stocking, order quantities and reorder dates.
The Bottom Line
Inventory management, even with all of the above tips can be a tedious task for many Amazon sellers. You will need to streamline your stock and maximize your sales. With thousands of products to take care of, it becomes an unprecedented headache to manage each and every SKU.
In such a scenario, it is always wise to outsource Amazon product data entry services to an offshore third-party service provider like Perfect Data Entry. With your inventory management taken care of, you can focus on maximizing your sales, and with that, your profits as well.
