Receiving deliveries, storing stocks, packaging orders, and shipping sold items to customers are all part of the process. And it’s your job to remove bottlenecks in these areas to increase overall productivity. Stock management across multiple SKUs can help wholesalers save money and boost productivity. However, with the challenges mentioned above–not to mention, the customer demands and supplier issues in the mix–it becomes more difficult to achieve. Drop this weight off your shoulder with effective wholesale inventory management.
Here are five tips for better wholesale inventory management
BoF unpacks how retailers can reduce the costs of returns and protect profit margins, while improving customers’ shopping experience to generate higher sales. Revive, meanwhile, works with brands across price points to repair returned items within three weeks to their original condition to be resold at full price on a brand’s site or through resellers like Poshmark and eBay. The company collects a commission from what’s sold on resale sites and charges a service fee for the refurbishing process. With advanced inventory management software, wholesalers can view balances in real-time to avoid shortages and overages. The tool can also handle labor-intensive and repetitive tasks, such as manually updating the inventory levels of thousands of SKUs.
Work process automation
On a scale of 1 to 10, with 1 being the most significant procedure and 10 being the least important process, evaluate the processes on your list. Breaking the work process down into smaller, more manageable parts is the next step once a process has been identified as needing improvement. Due to their overly convoluted work processes, too many firms get bogged down in the dependencies and decision-making processes of all of their projects. Keep the process straightforward by dividing it into distinct parts that only seek to get the intended result. Dropshipping is a type of order fulfillment where the provider sends the customer’s order directly from the supplier. Instead of selecting the item from their own stock when a store makes a sale, they buy it from a third party and have it shipped to the customer.
- By using a tool focused on inventory forecasting, you can interpret historical sales data, current events, and a host of other variables to analyze future demand.
- With e-commerce playing a large role in ordering product, it’s necessary to have integrated systems to capitalise on this market with the right technology.
- For instance, by ensuring that the process steps are consistently and frequently followed by any one person in charge of creating and dispersing the bills, the work of billing clients can be expedited.
- And for wholesalers who need to manage multiple suppliers, multiple customers, and lots of moving parts, it’s essential.
- Teams can always stand to gain from assessing and enhancing current working methods, whether it be for task allocation, quality control, or project monitoring.
- Buying in bulk allows a business to save on the per unit cost of the inventory they are acquiring which they can then mark up for sale to their customers.
Count your stock effectively
This includes core tasks such as purchase order management, stock control, and fulfilment. Wholesale inventory management is an important ingredient for any B2B product business that aspires to success and long-term profitability. And for wholesalers who need to manage multiple suppliers, multiple customers, and lots of moving parts, it’s essential. They then sell these items to retailers, passing on a portion of the discount as well. The e-commerce boom may have cooled but online returns rates remain high, and the costs of processing them are more expensive than ever.
- You’ll encounter problems like unrecorded stock, unexpected stock outages, and payments for items you never purchased if you don’t have a tried-and-true process for inspecting and recording incoming products to detect faults and damage.
- Attending trade shows is a great way to grow your network of wholesale contacts.
- Detailed analysis of factors such as market demand and customer needs are critical for this, and once again, inventory management software comes up with the goods here.
- Bazar, which launched last year, operates a marketplace where brands list items that aren’t in the condition to be restocked and sold at full price.
That number is only likely to increase — in 2023, 18 percent of all online orders in the US were returned, up from 17 percent in 2022, according to the National Retail Federation. Add to that, you must consider the needs of your customers (retailers or industry) and their customers. Any sequence of repetitive tasks carried out by an individual or group, in a particular order, to achieve a goal is referred to as a business process.
Minimum Order Quantity
The newer platforms aren’t yet a major growth driver for all of their brand partners. Halara, for example, sells on Bazar to meet internal sustainability goals instead of meaningfully increasing sales. Still, the startups are launching services to make it easier for labels to maximise their sales growth potential from reselling returned wares.
He’ll be replaced in January by co-founder, president and current COO Greg Schwartz, BoF has learned. The leadership wholesalers resell inventory to end users change occurs amid turbulent market conditions in sneaker resale. He is based in New York and covers digital-native brands and shifts in the online shopping industry.
- The C products are low-stock priority items that are frequently carried in large quantities and don’t require frequent reordering.
- While finding a middle ground on pricing can keep your business afloat, taking your business to the next level requires greater efforts—especially in the area of wholesale inventory management.
- It is frequently possible to make a strong commercial case for adopting such tools.
- Google maps is a great tool, allowing you to search for wholesalers across the current map extent that you choose.
How Does Inventory Management Work?
The wholesaler can then automatically inform the customer of an accurate timeframe for delivery, or tell them whether their own desired timeframe is achievable. At the very least, there should retained earnings be strong lines of communication between wholesaler and customer, whether they are a retailer, distributor, or another type of business. Having high visibility over inventory is therefore invaluable for these businesses. It is beneficial to have an inventory system that allows managers to know where each order or shipment is, and allows quick responses to customer requests, errors or other adjustments to an order that need to be made. The primary way to do so is to get in touch with the manufacturers of the goods you are trying to sell. With fashion’s pricing power reaching its limit, brands are grappling with how to cut prices without damaging their reputation or value.