Here it comes – the holidays. Those omnichannel retail business owners who made the smart decision to implement a solid technology-driven inventory management system this year may be feeling very thankful indeed at the dinner table on the day before Black Friday’s kickoff into the holiday buying season.
But for those retailers still dragging about making that decision to update their inventory management system, things may not go so well.
If that’s where you’re at, perhaps you could view this holiday season as an opportunity to pay attention and assess how well your business is delivering on supply and demand for your customers.
For example, retailers should know how well their merchandise sells. An inventory management system can help track real-time flow. You can’t guess about this. Running out of popular items is bad for business, especially during the holidays. Restocking in time still puts your business at risk of missing that buying window, which is always bad for business. Getting stuck with too much of a good thing in inventory hurts profitability.
How about your fulfillment process? Is your inventory management system in sync with online and in-store sales so that fulfillment of orders is efficient? The easiest way to lose customers is to disappoint them. The whole point of ecommerce, as far as your customers are concerned, is convenience. Even if they are late online shoppers, you can’t be late to deliver. There’s very little forgiveness there, as Best Buy learned the hard way a few years ago.
Retailers need to be smart when it comes to inventory management control. Thankfully, there are smart inventory management services that are designed to provide the tools retailers need to achieve best practices in quality inventory control without having to guess about it.