Excess inventory weighing you down? Get the most out of your stock now

(Source: Supplied.)

We’ve all seen the recent headlines. There’s a surplus of inventory. Warehouses are filled to the brim. Retailers are stuck with stock that just isn’t moving fast enough. And with peak season just around the corner, they need to clear it out. But how?

One way is liquidators. Another is markdowns. The question is, if you have to mark stock down, how do you maximise the margin on each order? How do you extract as much value as possible? 

1. Make your stores work harder

Don’t overlook your stores. Ramp up their fulfilment capacity and use them as mini distribution centres. You can specifically select stores that are well equipped to handle orders and you can deliver faster, empowering employees to efficiently pick and pack orders.

2. Use all your inventory, everywhere.

With consumer preferences changing rapidly, it’s harder than ever to accurately forecast demand. But with Ship from Store you can fulfil online orders from your entire pool of inventory, enabling you to sell more at higher margins, deliver faster and get more value from your in-store inventory – while also mitigating risk.

3. Get more customers into stores

Can you offer your customers the option to Click & Collect? When you use online sales to drive traffic into your physical stores, usually it leads to additional purchases of in-store goods. It also takes the pressure off your warehouses.

4. Maximise margins

Extracting maximum value from each order is top of mind – now more than ever. Adjust your sourcing strategies to help reduce markdowns. You can ship items from the store or location with the most inventory, the oldest inventory, the lowest sell-through rate or the highest in-store markdowns. By fulfilling online orders from strategic locations, you can help keep margins higher. This strategy works for seasonal markdowns, too. Stores may have markdowns available in their specific locations, but when you fulfil online orders from store stock, you can sell these marked-down products to customers in any location.

5. Reduce cancelled orders

When you don’t know what you have available to sell, it ultimately affects both your customer and bottom line. This is a problem that is multiplying across retail right now, and it is more important than ever to fix it. A distributed order management system allows you to track all your stock across all locations – and in near real-time. It can show what’s in stock, and what is being processed or ready for pickup or shipment. It can provide buffers for popular items, prevents overbuying and helps to reduce overselling and underselling.

6. Use a virtual inventory

Virtual inventory allows you to control what is sold in each channel or region virtually. You can create virtual pools of inventory that can be segmented in many ways including by channel, market, region, and/or product and include inventory rules such as buffers or exclusions.

You can isolate a portion of your inventory for online orders only and reserve the rest for in-store traffic. Or you can aggregate all stock, including store stock and make it available to sell online to reduce stockouts.

If you’d like to learn more ways to get the most out of your stock, download a copy of the free eBook, Advanced Sourcing Strategies.