Guess what’s coming sooner than you think? The holiday season, which is, of course, the most important time of year for retailers. If you want to gain profits in December, then September is the perfect time to get prepared.

Early fall can be a relatively “quiet” time for retailers so it makes sense to take advantage of this time to get your shop ready for the holiday rush. That means assessing your inventory management strategy so that you have enough of what your customers want when they’re ready to hopefully burst through your doors to do their holiday shopping.

An obvious first step is to make sure you have enough of your store’s more popular inventory items in stock. Nothing hurts a retailer more than disappointed customers. But how do you identify popular items and how can you make an educated guess on how much of those items to have available to sell? 

If you have an inventory management system for tracking inventory it should be easy to identify items that sold well last year at holiday-buying time.  Just run a retail and gross margin comparison report to help forecast what to expect.  In fact, this is a methodology you can use not only during the holidays, but at other times of year too, especially if you sell seasonal items.

If you have capabilities for doing accurate inventory counts and inventory reports, from Retail and Gross Margin inventory reports to SKU and price verification reports, you will be well prepared for the busiest time of year. But if you don’t, it’s not too late to find out how an inventory management service like Blue Chip, which provides these important inventory services, can get your business ready for the holidays.