Amazon is the largest online retail marketplace in the world, bringing in over 386 billion dollars in revenue during the year 2020. Amazon is packed with potential for both small and large businesses to build their business profits and expand their reach in the online marketplace.
However, Amazon is very different than most online marketplaces because of its massive size, capabilities, and strict seller guidelines. If you want to succeed, you need to have excellent inventory management, so it only makes sense that you need to invest in a strategy that works for your needs as a seller. But what does that mean?
An inventory management strategy is a set of processes created to ensure that you can meet customer demand when selling your products. It’s the method of selling, storing, and sourcing your inventory at the right place, time, cost, and stock.
A successful inventory management strategy can lead to a significant increase in sales, high ranking seller ratings, positive reviews and contribute to your business’s overall success.
With the right processes in place, most of your inventory management can be completely automated, either with Amazon’s online selling tools or through a professional inventory management company.
This allows you to focus on the more essential parts of your business instead of the everyday mundane tasks. By understanding the importance of proper management strategies to implement within your business, you’re sure to find success within your industry.
What is An Amazon Inventory Management Strategy?
As an Amazon seller, your goal is to increase brand awareness while maintaining and potentially increasing profitability in the marketplace. To do that, you must have a substantial inventory management strategy.
Your Inventory Management strategy is all about finding ways to drive your costs down efficiently while delivering a flawless experience to your customers. The most important ideas behind implementing a thorough inventory management strategy include:
- Understanding your inventory
- Supply lead times
- Supply chain components
- Creating systems to automate the issues you find within those components
- Implementing strong, repeatable fulfillment procedures
By investing in an Amazon inventory management strategy for your business, you’ll be able to:
- Consistently make sales while attracting your customers because you’ll have the inventory and products to support your orders.
- Manage any losses, theft, or inventory errors in your inventory.
- Confidently project inventory needs which will help decrease the price to store products or money lost on unsold goods.
- Stay on top of expiration dates, and reduce the amount of lost product due to unsellable goods.
The long-term benefits of creating an inventory management strategy go well beyond Amazon. Once a customer finds your products and likes what they receive, they’re likely to check out your website, become loyal customers, and even recommend other people they know to your products. Plus, you’re able to market to users worldwide by leveraging the visibility Amazon provides to sellers.
Why Bother Implementing Good Inventory Management Practices?
It’s one thing to sell a few products on Amazon. However, it’s another to scale into a fully-fledged business. Without proper management, your inventory will become a mess over time, which can affect how well you can deliver products to your customers.
With the appropriate systems in place, you’re able to effectively manage your inventory, including accurate count numbers, data to support your sales, and complete control of your supply chain so you can make the best decisions for your business.
If you’re curious how inventory management can make a true difference in your business, consider the following Amazon’s top sellers who could properly implement inventory management into their business.
1.PharmaPacks: With over one million total sales, Pharmapack sells everyday medicine, nutrition, baby, health, hair care, makeup, and other household products by reselling popular household brands like Tide and Scotch. They use giant warehouses to store their products and plan their stock levels efficiently to keep up with demand. By doing this, they have a consistently high rating on all of their products, none falling below 4.5 stars.
2.Utopia Deals: Utopia is a top retailer on Amazon, selling their brand line of bedding, towels, home, kitchen, and clothing items worldwide. They have around-the-clock warehouse operations, which helps to attribute to the success of their business. Utopia works closely with its supply chain to ensure that products arrive on time and that they can provide the best prices to their customers.
3.Feetures: Feetures was able to scale from a one-woman operation to a multi-figure profitable business by utilizing fulfillment by Amazon. Feetures used to ship from a manufacturer to a private warehouse and would then need to pick and send orders to customers. However, this process became unsustainable as orders started to grow.
They decided to change their procedure and have their manufacturer ship directly to Amazon fulfillment centers, allowing her to capitalize on Amazon’s resources, including their enormous warehouses and staff to pack, pick and ship their orders. Instead of spending hours filling orders, their business could focus on growing and reaching more customers.
Having an Amazon Inventory Management Strategy is imperative to your success. In each example we listed, the seller found a process that they could consistently repeat to guarantee success. They manage their product inventory and order fulfillment efficiently, which boosts their profitability while keeping their customers happy.
Where to Start With Your Amazon Inventory Management Strategy
The hardest part of any project is the very beginning when you have nothing in your hands to say that you’ve made it. That’s what it feels like to create an inventory strategy from scratch. You’ll face many hurdles when starting your Amazon management strategy, and that is entirely normal.
Like anything you must create from scratch, you have to start with the basics, including picking your products and creating attractive Amazon listings to attract customers to your page.
Then, you need to evaluate your supply chain to ensure you have the right amount of products in an appropriate amount of time to maintain your inventory and fill your customer’s needs. Finally, you’ll need to evaluate how much stock you keep on hand, how you store it, and the best fulfillment strategies to scale your business.
Your inventory management strategy will probably look a bit different than the examples in this post, depending on your specific industry. However, you’ll still need the overall structure provided in the steps above to create your inventory management foundation.
Amazing Inventory Management Without The Headaches
Without proper inventory management, your growth on Amazon will stall. Creating an efficient inventory management process might seem overwhelming to handle on your own.
Amazon requires a lot of your time to make your product listing, create product content, answer customer service inquiries, manage your seller central, and forecast your future sales.
It’s a lot to put on one person’s plate. However, it doesn’t have to be your problem. Thankfully, a top-tier, results-driven Amazon marketing agency for growing eCommerce brand, like Sunken Stone, exist to solve your struggles.
Allowing professionals who know how to grow Amazon sellers will help your business scale while taking away the pain of managing everything yourself.
