How to Prepare Your Inventory for Holiday Shopping Demands?
It takes time for sellers to master inventory management. But once you get a hang of it, it gets a lot easier to stay updated and keep track of your inventory. You must be aware of your inventory and your sales at all times. This is especially true during holidays when demands for both seasonal and regular items are in excess.
During holidays and other peak shopping events, the stock you order can quickly run out. On the other hand, demand vanishes swiftly once the holiday season draws to a close. So, how can you keep your inventory in check during high demand seasons and afterwards? Let’s find out!
Here, Alpha Repricer- the fastest Amazon repricer has the top 6 tips for effective inventory management to increase your sales and profits during the holiday season!
Categorize your inventory
The first tip is to categorize and organize your inventory according to its priority in terms of demand. Categorize your stock so that you don’t have to reorder it again and again while taking care of other important holiday tasks for your business. Yes, it can be a little expensive to order a bulk altogether, but it saves you from getting suspended just because you ran out of stock in the middle of the peak season.
We recommend you to go for the ABC analysis, which is the best way to categorize your products in relation to their demand!
Category A should consist of the items in demand during the season and move faster than usual items. These are the items that skyrocket your profits but only during the holiday season!
Category B should consist of those items that never contribute to your company’s profit the whole year, and you sell them irrespective of the season.
Category C should contain those items that are crucial for the company’s profit but have the least priority.
This method can help you figure out the seasonal items you can order only for the holiday season.
Forecast
One of the most difficult aspects of inventory management during the holiday season is to forecast demand. Now that you have categorized your seasonal items, you must make an educated estimate of how much product you are going to sell and the profit that comes with it. Go through your previous data and check out the stock levels of your previous seasonal sales. Note down your fast-moving stock during the season, and make sure to order those items more than your usual selling items.
Make sure you have dependable suppliers!
You can easily harm your efforts to carry out an effective inventory management system if you have an unreliable supplier. It’s time to take a stand if your supplier is consistently late in providing your orders on time or is incapable of delivering the whole order at once. Talk to your suppliers or manufacturers about your concerns and figure out what’s wrong. If they don’t get on board, then prepare yourself to change your suppliers so that you stay away from irregular inventory levels or the risk of dealing with a suspension due to depleted stock.
Be excellent at managing your orders.
When it’s shopping season, the high demand for your products brings in a flood of orders, and it gets pretty difficult to manage everything. You have to keep a close watch on your inventory, pack orders, keep track of your sales and shipping. To avoid going through all of this, get an order fulfillment system that takes care of your back-end activities. You can easily find an effective order management system that guarantees your activities are completed smoothly throughout the holiday season.
Track your sales
This may appear as a very obvious task, but it entails more than merely totaling up your revenues each day. Tracking your sales means you must know which product you sold when and how many. Make sure you keep track of your stock totals. As a seller, always see the bigger picture and don’t rely on basic information. You must study about your products that sell faster during the season and when they become out dated.
Moreover, understand which items bring you more profit if you start selling them together. Get creative and start learning about your products and how you sell them. If you want to deal with your inventory the smart way, you must understand the importance of focusing on your product performance and sales more rather than your profits.
It’s all about getting things done on time!
Businesses can choose their ideal inventory management approach after understanding their inventory performance during the different seasons. For each holiday season, planning, sourcing, and restocking are done differently.
The goal is to get enough inventory to fulfill the demand of your customers while avoiding having an excess of unsaleable goods at the end of the season. Keep an eye on your sales and if you have items that are not selling well during the season, start offering a discount on them. Come up with deals that will make your customers buy them. Don’t wait for the season to be over.
Make sure you follow these tips during Amazon Prime Day coming up on June 21st and 22nd! Also, Alpha Repricer, the fastest Amazon repricer, is offering a 50% discount for Amazon sellers to not only focus on inventory but also on keeping competitive product prices.
Sign up now for our 14-day free trial and experience our features to learn more!
