- Inventory Management
- What is inventory management?
- How can the right inventory management software help?
- What makes a good inventory management system
- The best inventory tools
- Repricing
- What is repricing software?
- How does the right repricing tool help sellers?
- The best repricing tools
Inventory Management
Ask anyone who has ever sold anything before – inventory management is pivotal. It’s the difference between a streamlined system, and a total mess that leaves buyer and seller feeling muddled and dissatisfied.
What is inventory management?
In the broadest sense, inventory management is the practice of overseeing and streamlining your inventory, from ordering stock to storing it and, of course, selling it. It’s a process that runs from your suppliers to your customers, logging and overseeing every step in between.
As you can imagine, the central tenets of inventory management are the same for totally physical stores as they are for wholly digital stores and selling platforms. When you get into the finer details, however, inventory management in the digital world requires its own, unique set of solutions.
How can the right inventory management software help?
For sellers, the right tool will streamline the entire, ongoing process of inventory management, essentially freeing up significant time for you to see to more demanding areas of the business. Cutting out those repetitive tasks – and, at the same time, cutting out the risk of user error in favour of automation – will support the business not only now, but as it grows.
A great tool will boost the overall accuracy of your stock management, as well as freeing you up to be more productive elsewhere, and saving you the money that can easily be wasted on simple (and common) mistakes. You can avoid delays and lost business caused by low stock levels that went unnoticed, and predict demand based on valuable insights produced automatically. These benefits filter down to the customer, giving them a much more positive experience supported by a strong business model, itself operated by someone who has the time and availability to work on honing other areas of the business.
It’s not just about convenience. Mishandled stock costs sellers some serious money, and can have a profound, long-term impact on the customer experience. Automating inventory management facilitates better health now, as well as growth and development into the future.
Scalability is, for that reason, key, but there are more traits that we look for when reviewing the inventory management tools available to Amazon sellers…
What makes a good inventory management system?
We have tried and tested a wide range of inventory management tools, and consistently look for the same benchmarks of quality. We know what benefits Amazon sellers the most, which is why the top spots on our list are always taken by:
- Strong insights
The practice of managing inventory well has the potential to yield some incredibly beneficial insights into your products, and your customers. While many of these insights can easily pass you by if you don’t have a strong tool at your disposal, the right tool can produce insightful and easy-to-digest data as part and parcel of its automations.
- Integration
Inventory management spans an incredibly wide arena which, as we’ve mentioned, includes everyone in the chain from your vendors to your customers. If you cannot integrate your omnichannel under a single, automated tool – and if, each time you make a sale, you’re forced to manually log that with your stock management tool – then it’s not doing as much as it could (or, more aptly, should) be doing.
Successful integration means seamless, omnichannel automation – exactly what a seller needs in this digital landscape.
- Usability
The most comprehensive tool in the world will still feel like a big inconvenience if the user experience hasn’t been optimised. Any software that is genuinely valuable to its users will score highly in any review of usability, and inventory tools are no exception.
Click here to take a look at our Amazon Inventory Tool Brands.
Repricing
Ecommerce has reshaped traditional retail, and tailored it to the unique world we step into through our screens, and repricing is a prime example of this. Both the market and the competition are stronger than ever, and being primed and ready to adjust prices against new and evolving trends is the mark of a good seller.
But sitting at your computer, waiting for the next sign to raise or lower your prices is not efficient – and, most importantly, it is not tenable.
What is repricing software?
Repricing software is designed to automate the process of repricing stock, making your entire storefront more adaptable, and constantly ready to outpace competitors.
But repricing software doesn’t just lower or raise your prices at will. Users devise a repricing strategy ahead of time, and this strategy is put into practice by the repricing tool, meaning that nothing every strays outside of your control, even when repricing is no longer your day-to-day, week-by-week responsibility.
How Does the Right Pricing Tool Help Sellers?
It automates a process that could easily become a full-time job in and of itself.
On a platform as competitive and high stakes as Amazon, repricing is not an occasional job to be done as and when you find the time. It’s something that needs to be done reactively, based on a wide range of scenarios – many of which can arise at less than a moment’s notice.
Automation weighs the competition considerably in your favour, since you don’t need to spend every waking moment implementing your pricing strategy by hand across a (potentially) broad range of stock. Again, this means that implementing a strong tool will give your productivity a boost, and free-up significant bouts of time.
The question of which tool offers the best benefit to you will depend on your pricing strategy. You can take a look at our comparison of competitive vs velocity repricing for more information on the subject.
The right pricing tool will be fast, intuitive, and simple to use. For Amazon Repricing Tool Brands, take a look at our list.
