As a wholesale business, your inventory is your lifeblood.
Your entire business model is centered around the concept of being able to move bulk quantities of products regularly. This means that you’re going to have large stores of inventory that you’re going to need to manage effectively. Otherwise, you could find yourself hemorrhaging money faster than you can keep track of.
So, what can you be doing to improve your inventory management?
Too Much is Too Much
It would help if you kept your on-hand inventory down to a minimum.
We get it, you’re afraid of being out of stock on a product, but you need to remember that storing products takes money too. The more on hand inventory you have, the more it’s going to cost your business to store. Not just in the capital either, having too much of one product could mean not having enough of another. Either way, you’re losing out.
It’s easy to let the fear of not having enough take you over, but you need to be able to make sure you don’t have too much either.
We Have the Technology
There isn’t much of an excuse to not be using technology for your business in 2019.
Yes, you should still have physical copies to act as backups in case your servers go down, but if you don’t already have an electronic system in place, you desperately need to get one. It makes the entire process that much easier on yourself and your employees in knowing what you have in stock and how much.
Technology can do in seconds what would take a person minutes if not more to accomplish. No more shuffling through sheets so you can inform a customer that you do have that item in stock when you can type it into a search engine and say yes, we have that in inventory.
It makes the purchasing experience more convenient for your customers while also making it a more straightforward process for your employees.
Out with the Old
Not everything you order can be a success.
There’s always a chance that something that you thought would be a slam dunk will turn into a deadweight, dead stock that now only clutters your shelves and takes up space that could be filled by something else.
As we’ve said before, your warehouse space is finite and vital.
While it might be hard, sometimes you need to admit defeat. Keeping them in your warehouse is only going to drain you of money at this point. You can sell them as a massively discounted price to try and earn some cash back, and you can give them away to charities or merely dispose of them in their entirety.
However, you decided to get rid of them, better sooner than later.
As a wholesale business, your inventory is one of your most valuable assets. If you can’t keep it in order and efficient, then your business is going to fail. Hopefully, these few tips will have shown you the path to running your inventory in a practical matter and getting your business on the track to make a profit.
Tips
- Expiration Dates. If you’re working with products that have a shelf life, you need to be able to know when they expire and how soon you should be selling them.
- Set Alerts. If you have an electronic system, you can configure automated alerts to let you know that something needs your attention.
