Running an eCommerce business requires a simple yet important requirement of delivering the right products at the right time framework. However, facing several inventory management challenges for retailers prevent the required growth and brand trust factor. It is essential to seek a favorable solution from an expert technical partner.
Nowadays, with the help of digital transformation solutions, the retail business is thriving at an exponential rate. By looking at the demands of a multitude variety of products that customers like to buy online, the number of eCommerce platforms is increasing at a fast pace.
Undoubtedly, the majority of eCommerce companies in advanced technologies for upgrading their operations and offer exceptional customer service experience. Concerning the same, integrating single or multichannel inventory management solutions is essential for enterprises to maintain the stock of a wide range of products.
Delivering products at the right time to the right customer and at the right location is the primary and most important requirement of retail business. It is extremely important for companies to manage inventory at different phases. However, there is a substantial rise in inventory management challenges for retailers due to which products fail to reach on time. Not not, it hampers the company’s reputation among the target audience, but degrades the overall credibility factor.
Also view: Everything to Understand About Magento Business Intelligence
Top 6 inventory management challenges for retailers & solutions to overcome
As an online retailer, you might be facing several difficulties in managing your single or multistore inventory. As a result of which, you fail to deliver products at the respective location. Here’s the list of inventory management-related obstacles in your way and find the solutions to overcome them.
1. Difficulty in managing multiple channels & warehouses
Remember the initial time of adopting eCommerce solutions for the retail industry and starting off with a single product sales channel. During that time, it was simple and efficient to manually manage the inventory and ensure seamless delivery of products.
However, as time flies and your business gets expanded, you find the need to manage multi-store sales channels and warehouses. You need this to fulfill the rising product demands among the wide spectrum of customers. During such a scenario, it will be challenging on your part to manually manage the inventory and meet the demands of customers. It is important for you to enable multi warehouse management solutions to automate your product listing, information management, and keeping a close eye on the inventory. The centralized system will help you maintain stock availability, add new products, overview sales, and other inventory-related tasks.
2. Overstocking your inventory with manifold products
Another significant challenge that retailers come across is overstocking or adding more than required products in the inventory. As a result of this, eCommerce business professionals find it difficult to manage extra products.
Overstocking your Magento store inventory can lead to the following issues:
- Difficulty in selling extra products to customers and end-up bearing a huge loss.
- Products left lying in the inventory that have shorter shelf life will damage after a certain period of time.
- You find further challenges in keeping a record of overstocked inventory
The solution
To meet overstock-related inventory management challenges for retailers, you can rely on regular stock audit software. This software conducts a daily audit of your current product stock lying in the inventory and provides information on damaged products, leftover items, and those having a short life. Based on these details, you can keep the relevant products in the inventory and get rid of overstocking issues with ease.
3. Outdated set of products
The world is moving fast and so is the demand for particular products among customers. There might be the case that customers want particular products at present and no longer need them in the future. This situation is a common part of the online jewelry industry in which trend changes at regular intervals. Keeping old-fashioned products in your eCommerce inventory result in minimal to low customer demand. As a result, it will be counted as deadstock, while causing huge loss to your enterprise.
To deal with the situation, rely on Business Intelligence analytics solutions to analyze your product-specific data and ascertain the following details.
- Predict the future forecast of products based on upcoming demand on festive days or something.
- Stock or unstock products as per the upcoming demand pattern.
- Predict the difficulty in managing particular products within your retail inventory.
- Also, predict the number of products required in your eCommerce store.
- Additional three inventory management challenges for retailers
In connection with the above-mentioned inventory-related difficulties, there are a few additional ones as follows:
- Difficulty in managing an unsellable list of products.
- Rely on outdated or inadequate technology.
- Lack of visualizing the eCommerce products data.
Also view : Benefits of Grocery Shopping App Development
Concluding Thoughts
In reality, inventory management challenges require immediate attention, be it facing fashion & apparel, daily consumable, or even for the online grocery industry. Implement feature-rich inventory management solutions with the help of a reliable tech partner to overcome numerous inventory-related issues. Concerning the same, hire a Magento developer from a leading organization like Magento India to develop fully customized inventory management software.
