How to Manage Warehouse Inventory for Retailers Effectively?

Inventory refers to the total amount of goods or material available in stock. Retailers need to keep adequate goods from suppliers by their sides, so that they can satisfy consumers’ demand timely without long waiting time during stages of supplier chain. Besides, because of economies of scale, they can get more favorable price on bulk orders than small quantities, which also incent retailers to hold inventory.

Though holding inventory is necessary, doing so is costly. Therefore, managing warehouse inventory becomes essential; it allows a company to minimize cost while continuing to meet customer demand. Then how to manage warehouse inventory for retailers? There are several factors need to be considered:

Inventory management system

An inventory management system helps to automate the inventory process because it records the incoming of merchandise, the outgoing of merchandise from processing customer invoices or shipments and tracks the number of each item that should still be on the warehouse shelves. It can also alert a business owner or employee in the company when it is time to reorder specific items. This helps to ensure that there is never too much or too little of the merchandise on hand. Physical inventory management team

One of the keys to retail inventory management is hiring an inventory management team with a intelligent manager to physically count the products or merchandise. Physical counts should take place at least two to three times per year. For example, a physical count of the merchandise or products should occur when it arrives in the warehouse. A second physical counting may take place mid-year, such as during the June or July summer months of the year.

A schedule for recounting

Proper warehouse inventory management also requires reconciliation of inventory records. This entails a physical recounting of the products or merchandise. Printing out inventory records can show what the inventory management system says is on hand. This list can be reconciled with the physical count of the number of items that are actually in stock. Updates to the inventory management system can then be made to reflect in the inventory records.

New inventory prediction

Keeping sales and ordering records in order is extremely important to good retail inventory management. Using past sales records, an inventory manager may be able to accurately predict when new inventory should be ordered, how much is likely to sell over a given period of time, and what the likelihood is that all inventory will be sold before it expires. With this data, inventory management can help reduce waste by eliminating excess orders, while not risking customer satisfaction by running out of a particular product. Without accurate, regular sales and ordering data, inventory management can quickly turn into a wasteful guessing game.

Managing inventory is essential for retailers while to manage inventory effectively is a both time-consuming and money consuming job for most retailers. If you are running a small retailing business and have not much energy or time to handle so much inventory chores, it’s often recommendable to either do a drop shipping to skip it, or outsource it to a third party who are professionally running inventory managing and orders fulfillment in the country or region that your goods are mainly source from. A third party warehouse fulfillment company often has strong and experienced inventory management team and sophisticated systems to keep you updated with the real-time data of inventory. Besides you will also improve the order fulfillment efficiency and shipping cost by destributing the goods from countries that is closer to potential customers.