Consumer Experience

Managing your Inventory on Multiple Channels

Not an easy task without an inventory system! In this guest post, Wiser’s new partner, SkuVault, delves into how an inventory & warehouse management system lessens the logistical distress of selling on multiple channels.

Managing your inventory as an eCommerce retailer is becoming more and more challenging due to the evolution of customers into “multichannel” shoppers. For the uninitiated, a “channel” in eCommerce refers to a venue through which products are sold – Amazon, eBay, international versions of those marketplaces such as Amazon UK or eBay AU, and your own personal eCommerce site created via a service like Shopify, Magento, or Bigcommerce – these are all considered “channels”, and although they certainly increase exposure to your brand, managing your inventory across several simultaneously can present a bit of a problem if you don’t utilize an inventory system. An integrated retail inventory system allows retailers to more tightly control the flow of merchandise into stores and manage a myriad of multichannel shopping scenarios.

Keeping Track of Inventory

Keeping inventory levels up-to-date can be an overwhelming operational expense for retailers, especially for those having to manage inventory across multiple suppliers, online stores and sales channels. Also having too many out of stock, low quality and outdated or expired items on a retail website can result in lost customers and damage to a store’s good reputation. With real-time inventory management software, retailers get real-time visibility into all the top and slow moving products on each online store so that you can make the proper adjustments to keep stock levels optimal and costs down. No longer will you need to have multiple systems to fulfill customer’s orders and expectations. The software allows you to receive goods into the store electronically to perform quality inspections and avoid accidentally selling more products than you have in stock.

Warehouse Management

A multichannel retailer’s aim – and, let’s hope, any retailer’s aim – is to deliver accurate goods at the right time, at the right location, in the right amount and in the right quality. So there is no doubt that their orders have to be routed to the correct warehouse and then fulfilled in a timely and efficient manner. Also with every order there are multiple steps managed by different teams at various stations throughout their warehouse, so anything can go wrong! This is where the warehouse management system enriches the multi-channel solution by providing retailers with sophisticated functionality and multiple options to reduce warehouse operations and fulfillment costs, manage orders across multiple warehouse locations as well as drop ship partners and store locations, streamlines product and inventory management, helping them to improve delivery times.

How do we know so much about inventory & warehouse management?

SkuVault GP 2
SkuVault is a high performance, best practice-driven inventory & warehouse management system designed specifically for multichannel environments. It utilizes barcode scanners in conjunction with product and location barcode labels which offers total visibility of inventory availability ensuring accurate ‘available to sell’ levels are published to your sales channels to avoid ‘stock outs’ or over selling.

Managing your inventory across multiple channels is definitely feasible with the help of a good inventory & warehouse management system – and it’s essential if you’d like to take it a step further and expand into international channels.

Have a thing or two to add to our discussion of inventory management? Feel free to leave a comment!

 

SkuVault CEO pic

About the author

Andy Eastes is the CEO of SkuVault. He has been active in the eCommerce community for 10 years, and has a passion for increasing efficiency for eCommerce and wholesale businesses. SkuVault is an inventory and warehouse management system for eCommerce retailers, that helps you take control of your inventory.

Laptop mockup illustration

Better decisions can only come from better data.

Contact Us Today
CTA Decoration Image 1 CTA Decoration Image 2

2 Comments

  • […] Managing your inventory as an eCommerce retailer is becoming more and more challenging due to the evolution of customers into “multichannel” shoppers. For the uninitiated, a “channel” in eCommerce refers to a venue through which products are sold – Amazon, eBay, international versions of those marketplaces such as Amazon UK or eBay AU, and your own personal eCommerce site created via a service like Shopify, Magento, or Bigcommerce – these are all considered “channels”, and although they certainly increase exposure to your brand, managing your inventory across several simultaneously can present a bit of a problem if you don’t utilize an inventory system. An integrated retail inventory system allows retailers to more tightly control the flow of merchandise into stores and manage a myriad of multichannel shopping scenarios. Read the rest! […]

  • jamessmith66 November 19, 2015

    Well said and I completely agreed your points have mentioned. The main role of Mult-channel inventory management system will helps you to manage inventory for all sales channels at single interface. As well as recently I have found a article on “How centralized inventory management help businesses face multi-channel challenges”. Hope it will be very useful to you. Check it out : http://cont.lu/modern-inventory-management

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *