Increase Inventory

5 Tips to Increase Sales through Smarter Inventory Management Nov 18, 2013 3:08 PM By Brandon Levey

As your business grows, it is inevitable that the number of online and offline sales channels will grow with it. Whether you’re selling in a bricks and mortar store, at an online marketplace like Amazon or eBay, on your website or all of the above, properly managing inventory across all of your sales channels can be the key to your success. In order to best maximize your efforts and keep your inventory off the shelves and into the hands of customers, here are five tips to follow.

Treat your inventory as cash you can’t spend Properly managing your inventory is key in understanding how you can increase your cash flow. Inventory is often the largest current asset of businesses that sell products, and in order to keep the money moving, be sure you are viewing the stock on your shelves as cash you can’t spend. You need to focus on smarter buying decisions and how you can best forecast what will sell. You obviously can’t do this alone. But luckily, there are several cloud software tools that can help you make smarter decisions when it comes to purchasing, so that you’re not left with large stock quantities.

Remember that you have a limited quantity of inventory This may seem like a no-brainer, but if you have most of your stock being represented on the floor of your brick-and-mortar store or in multiple online stores, you’ll need to be conscious of this. If you have a pair of shoes that are being purchased at your store and are also listed online, you need a system that integrates both your POS and online shop to help alleviate double selling.

For example, Farm Fresh sells its T-shirts direct-to-consumers on its e-commerce site, and it also fills custom, bulk T-shirt orders for large businesses like Facebook Inc. Farm Fresh has to know they can deliver T-shirts by the day they need them, but because each shirt comes in 15 styles and seven sizes, keeping track...