As a company grows in size and scope, it becomes harder to keep track of its inventory supplies. Retailers begin to offer an increasing number of products, which in turn makes the entire proposition that much more confusing. By leveraging the power of technological solutions, small business owners can make this prospect a far easier one. Try out these techniques and see if they can’t make things easier to track inventory for an online store.
1. Set Up a Single-Screen Dashboard
Several online sales services give users the freedom to check on inventory and shipping updates from the same screen. Configuring shopping cart software to do this can be challenging and it might take some time to do so. Once it’s up and running, however, the system should prove so easy to use that it would all be worth it. Some of the major online retailers have actually combined this approach with machine learning algorithms so they can accurately predict when conditions might change.
2. Integrate All of Your Sales Channels Together
Multichannel sales apps have become rather popular in the last few years. That’s because business owners who sell in a storefront and online have struggled to keep track of their inventory in multiple places. Those who run individual dispensaries or have supplement brands have long found this extremely challenging since many of them move more or less the same amount of products in equal numbers from both channels. Aggregating inventory numbers into a single database and then subtracting items from it each time they’re sold will keep everything updated no matter where customers prefer to make transactions from. A few mobile apps and a single spreadsheet application should be enough to get started with this kind of tracking workflow.
3. Use Multidimensional Bar Codes
Shipping managers who don’t mind scanning products as they’re sent out can use sophisticated two-dimensional bar codes that can store far more information in them than a mere number. Some might even want to use radio frequency identification tags since these can scan themselves automatically whenever they pass near a certain type of reader. Online stores that use either of these technologies can store more than 1,000 bytes of data on every label. They can even be used on the outside of packages to provide additional information for shippers.
4. Assign Individual Product Numbers
There’s a good possibility that the serial numbers used for most products aren’t original. Sales managers who’ve insisted on short and memorable ones may want to start rolling out much longer inventory numbers. Companies that use unique identifiers can be certain that their records are more accurate than those that may have fallen victim to collisions from time to time. Slashing the number of collisions should also reduce the amount of software maintenance needed to keep an inventory tracking system running.
Business owners with an online store are finding new ways to track their inventories every day, so it may be useful to pay close attention to trade publications and other news sources.
