Your Inventory management software lies at the heart of any growing product-based e-commerce business. It’s not your online presence or killer social media strategy.
As you grow your e-commerce business by moving into new sales channels and markets, your order volume will increase, but so will the complexity of fulfilling orders from multiple sales channels. If you’re still managing your inventory manually, there comes a point when it flips from manageable to unmanageable. The Inventory Management Software Market size is projected to reach $3000 mn by 2028, growing at a CAGR of 12%.
Automating this essential part of your business brings key benefits. In this article, we’ll unpack the key benefits of Inventory management automation and the impact it can have on other parts of your business.
What is Inventory Management?
Inventory management software is a key part of your overall supply chain, allowing you to track the acquisition, storage, and sale of your products at any time.
Once you know the location of each product, you will also be able to track the inventory status at any given time at an accurate and detailed level.
When you can automatically track how much inventory you have and exactly where it is, inventory management turns from a tedious manual process into a key part of your business growth strategy.
Once accurate inventory details can be maintained across each sales channel, you can use this information to predict inventory planning and automate the restocking process, bringing even greater efficiency to your inventory management process. Once you’ve purchased these products, you can also track them from your supplier, to your warehouses (down to the exact shelf) and through the fulfillment process to the customer and back through the returns process.
Benefits of using an Inventory management system
Using software for a key business process like inventory management brings with it a huge number of benefits, including:
Automated inventory management:
Potentially the biggest benefit of Inventory management software is automation. Automation eliminates the risk of human error, saving you endless hours and ensuring you don’t make mistakes. It is a system that can perform repetitive tasks with little manual assistance once a set of rules has been set up. This not only helps you keep track of your inventory levels in real time, as your inventory is automatically updated when a sale is made. This feature is essential for accurate predictions and providing a good customer experience by avoiding overselling. Automated inventory management also gives you real-time visibility into where your inventory is, which is especially important if you store inventory in multiple locations, such as a warehouse and physical store, or with more than one sales channel.
Holiday and peak season inventory forecasting:
When order volume increases substantially due to holidays or events throughout the year, such as a large marketing push from an influencer, your inventory quantity will keep up with demand thanks to accurate demand forecasts. Historical and seasonal data can also be used to understand any sales patterns that require inventory adjustments at different times of the year.
Avoid stockouts and overselling:
Overselling is a big challenge for growing e-commerce businesses. When you don’t have accurate information about your inventory, it’s very easy to run out of products without knowing it, leading to stockouts. Not only are your customers unlikely to return, resulting in a wasted marketing budget and customer acquisition costs, but you may also be suspended from certain marketplaces. An inventory management software manages orders and inventory across all your sales channels simultaneously, so you know when to restock.
Reduce e-commerce business costs:
Advanced inventory management reports tell you what you have in stock, so your warehouse workers don’t waste time searching for inventory that isn’t actually in stock. This makes the pick-up, packing, and shipping process seamless so that you can handle multiple orders as efficiently as possible.
Another way to save money is not to order too many products with low sales volumes. With accurate data and statistical overviews, you will be able to understand the products your customers are buying clearly.
Harness the power of the right eCommerce inventory management software – and you can reduce costs, increase profitability and increase efficiency, all at the same time. Automating your inventory management leaves you more time to focus on marketing and growth while giving you complete visibility into your sales data and inventory movements so you can spot sales opportunities or mitigate inventory issues before they happen. For more information, please contact Coding Brains.
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