Speak the bold truth!

Most of the wholesalers who are preparing for online selling are concerned about this question. 

One type of people hesitate on this question, then leave their online selling plan stay as an idea. 

Another type of person might have an internal management problem due to wrong decision-making during the beginning stage. Then, it will lead to unsatisfied service quality and failure of the online selling plan. Both two groups of people will feel regretful. 

If you are thinking about the same type of question, check this article out. I believe you will find your answer here.  

If we don’t manage inventory while doing online selling, there is one situation that must appear during your online selling —— you don’t have the product in stock after the client made an order online. This will directly influence your brand reputation and revenue. Once you don’t have a good reputation online, it would be hard for you to do online selling.

If we manage the inventory while doing online selling, we need to count the inventory in both warehouses and shops. One thing we must face would be, who will be the person to count the inventory in a massy warehouse with tons of stock. And how? A real happened situation is, the salesperson sold some products while one staff just counted the inventory. And we noticed that this is a circle, it is impossible to count the accurate inventory even we spend one day. But we do need to find a solution coz we can’t stop our business for inventory counting only. If we do, then it’s purely wasting energy and time.

Especially on your peak hours, you might even don’t have time to count the products that you just received coz you are busy on cashier and might hang the product right away.

  

Challenge is everywhere!

That would be a big challenge for the wholesalers who don’t do inventory management at all or seldom do. 

Then, by thinking about the solution of inventory management, your online selling might face a big challenge and even go failure due to this problem. 

So! 

While we do online selling, should we manage inventory or not? YES, YOU MUST MANAGE INVENTORY!

At the beginning stage, should we manage inventory or not? IT DEPENDS!

You need to find a personalized solution to your situation. 

Tips

No matter what strategy you have, you need to make sure that you use minimum time to open an online store. Then you can be ready to receive an order and build your brand reputation. Then you can take your time on the other tasks, but, make sure that when the client makes an order, you do have the stock.

Over time, you will have a good reputation for your online store. At this point, more clients will come due to word of mouth, and the total clients' number will increase dramatically. Internet will accelerate this process, the result would be, you will receive tons of orders from those online clients.

So, don’t think about inventory management while you don’t even have online clients. It’s a wrong thinking direction. Do not waste your time on ‘The chicken or the egg’ problem. 

Inventory management is focusing on ‘in’ and ‘out’, especially in ‘in’ management. If we can deal with ‘in’ management well, then the inventory management is almost done. 

Please check some examples below:

The on-shop wholesale mode is: first, make an order; second, count the product and pack everything. In this case, inventory management is mandatory and easy to do.

The salesperson needs to know the accurate inventory information while making an order. Otherwise, the new product will become the leftover product remain in your warehouse.

How to make your inventory management easy? By using MC Application, salespeople have enough time to choose the product style and color based on clients’ needs. Then you got enough time to manage inventory with a 0-error rate.

Do your inventory ‘out’ management and purchase form well, the basic inventory management is done!

Then we can easily achieve our goal: “ The available product stock amount in your online store will automatically be shown ‘sold out’ while the last one has been sold.” And the management cost is very low if you use MC App.

Another type of on-shop wholesale mode is: first, get the product; second, make the order (payment). Without the help of a product barcode, it’s quite hard to count the accurate inventory. As the picture is shown below, it is an example of this on-shop wholesale mode.

The client spent one-hour choosing products, then the cashier needs to count the product, fill the checkout form, and finish the payment in a short time. Under this type of mode, the pressure of this order is compressed at the last step —— the cashier. 

Especially during the peak hours, several clients might be queuing to check out and the cashier needs to identify the product by memory instead of the barcode. Then the risk to make a mistake is quite high under the working volume and stress.

A qualified cashier needs to face the stress every day and make sure there is no mistake.

If you are in this mode and you don’t use a barcode settlement, then the inventory of your online store won’t be so accurate. However, you should try to avoid that you don’t have any available stock while the client makes an order in your online shop.

For example, manually mark your sold out product as ‘out of stock’ in your online store while you noticed there is no more available in your warehouse. We called this method as traditional inventory management.

 There are lots of suppliers with middies size business scale in Spain and Italy keeps the on-shop wholesale mode (get the product first, then make the order/payment). 

The biggest challenge in their business management is cashier/payment management.

It looks like the video below if you use a barcode to do checkout for your clients:

All your effort will increase working efficiency, order rate, and re-purchase rate!

Come on, there are always more ways than problems!

Thank you for reading and I wish you a prosperous business!