Inventory management is one of the most difficult challenges for online retailers, especially as sales and traffic grow. Effective inventory management contributes directly to a better client experience in eCommerce.
The three most prevalent inventory management difficulties are listed below, along with the comprehensive BigCommerce stock guide to enhancing the end-user experience for your customers.
Oversells
Out-of-stock orders are a huge cause of frustration for both businesses and customers. These orders result in a loss of sales and unfavorable feedback. Such bad comments might subsequently reduce your ranking in search results, discouraging potential consumers from converting. Consumers that get out-of-stock alerts are generally upset, unhappy, and/or disillusioned with your company, and are unlikely to return to your store.
How can you avoid overselling and the generated bad sentiment? The most secure method in the BigCommerce stock guide is to:
- Establish an airtight auditing mechanism and use barcode scanners to reduce human mistakes to keep an exact inventory count.
- With an inventory management system that links with your channels, you can sync your inventory and provide that precise count to your multiple markets. After that, gather all of your orders in one place. In this approach, your channels will display your inventories live, displaying the availability of your items in real time.
- If something falls between the gaps, use the history reports in your inventory management system to identify the cause of the mistake. Track down the problem and fix it right away.
Stockouts
A stockout is an item that you do not have in stock and is now shown as unavailable on your website. You may be wondering how this constitutes an inventory failure. Because this is a hot product rather than one you are phase-out, you will keep the product listing up and let buyers know when it will be back in stock.
With an inventory management system’s forecasting functions and reorder reports, you can avoid stockouts. Forecasting will assist in identifying tendencies, such as how rapidly particular items sell. Reorder pieces remind you to reorder items so that you always have available supplies.
Picking & Shipping Errors
Mis-picks, missed shipments, and damaged products are the three most common picking and shipping faults, and they can all be dramatically minimized by a quality control inventory management procedure.
Quality Control (QC) may be implemented in a variety of methods and at various stages of the order fulfillment process. QC can occur during pick when the picker compares the item to the order and performs a visual examination for damage and consistency.
Quality control can be performed just before delivering the product, either by the shippers themselves or by a qualified QC specialist. Regardless of how you implement the Quality Control process, it will serve as a safeguard to keep your customers’ expectations; after all, receiving the wrong product or a damaged item is one of the worst things that can happen to your client, aside from not receiving their goods at all.
BigCommerce stock guide – To conclude,
Atom8 will make inventory management no longer a real headache for your eCommerce business. With this BigCommerce stock guide, we hope you will be able to alleviate some of your headaches while enhancing your customer experience. We would love to hear from you if you have any questions! Please don’t hesitate to reach out to us. Feel free to leave us any comments or questions. We would love to hear from you!