Stay Organized and Efficient
For those looking to start an Amazon business, one of the most intimidating subjects might just be inventory management. In many cases, your Amazon inventory management may not present a problem, particularly for low-volume or handmade item stores. However, once you begin to grow and scale your Amazon operations, there is the very real possibility that you might need to consider some larger-scale inventory management.
Luckily, Amazon has a long list of its own inventory management tools, and those tools can be learned and leveraged to help your business operate more smoothly. Those can be relatively complicated, however, and you’ll need to learn them in the first place, which can take some significant time and potentially even some mistakes and growing pains. There is another option though, and that is hiring an Amazon inventory management service to handle all of those headaches for you, in exchange for a modest fee of course.
Inventory is the stock of products that you are selling for a profit on Amazon. Inventory management is the process of tracking and managing the storage of those products in a way that most efficiently and effectively meets the customer’s demand. Inventory management is a term that applies not only to how the inventory is stored, but how that inventory is sourced initially, as well as how they are processed in preparation for sale.
Your inventory represents a significant investment, and the outcome of poor or lazy inventory management can mean your next product won’t be on hand for weeks or even months. This gives your competitors a chance to establish themselves, potentially squeezing you out, or making a profitable return with that same product, difficult.
Depending on what you’re selling, the inventory itself may be in danger if not promptly sold. For those who sell fresh or even live goods, this can be disastrous. Delays can mean spoilage, dead stock, high storage costs, and more. Depleted stock for confirmed orders can even cause significant damage to your brand’s reputation if not remedied immediately.
You know by now that your inventory is a significant investment that you make in your business, but that inventory also becomes a business asset. However, unlike many other assets, that inventory can become a liability if not properly managed. While it may seem easy enough to manage your inventory while your operation is still relatively small, once your business begins to grow and develop you may begin to encounter issues including:
First of all, you’ll need to make sure that you have enough inventory to ship out to potential customers quickly, but you also need to take care that you don’t amass excess inventory. Having too much inventory means you have a lot more capital tied up in that asset, which can eat up other money for transportation and storage resources. This is what is known as an “opportunity cost”, and there is a significant opportunity cost to sitting on excess inventory. It can be difficult to manage quickly, and it may age and devalue or force you to liquidate.
The other side of that coin is that you can also run dangerously low on stock, because it is crucial to revenue creation, and because nobody wants to tell their customer that they are out of stock. The right inventory level for your business will depend on seasonality, history, or customer demand. The only way to find out is to run a demand planning analysis to determine the optimum level.
Stranded stock happens when sellable stock is in a fulfillment center or similar warehouse setting but is not listed for sale on your site. You have inventory, but you aren’t technically putting it up for sale. This is also known as dead stock. This can result in storage costs for products that aren’t even being shown to customers.
Spoilage is a concern for anyone selling something with an expiration date. Things like food, cosmetics, and supplements all have a sell-by or use-by date, and when that date passes and you still own your inventory, that investment just becomes largely worthless.
Storage costs are one of the unavoidable aspects of using Amazon FBA models or private storage. Making sure your storage is optimized is crucial to keeping costs low and profits maximized. Even Amazon FBA will still require you to track your inventory level to avoid excessive fees for inventory storage.
We buy millions of dollars of high quality big-brand name merchandise directly from manufactures and big box retailers. We pass on an amazing (wholesale price) to you. We own our warehouse and fulfill your manifest in blazing speed. We carry many big brand names that the vast majority of sellers struggle to acquire.
We Move Fast! As your order is being fulfilled at the warehouse, the upload team is optimizing your listings simultaneously.
1) We inspect, pack, prep, polybag, fold and ship to Amazon.
2) We upload each individual item.
3) We optimize each listing.
We Do the Heavy Lifting!
When a customer makes an order on Amazon from your store via Amazon FBA, the item is delivered to the customer. Amazon professional sellers generally get paid by Amazon every two weeks. Each payment includes 14 days of orders that were successfully delivered seven days ago.
Inventory management systems are computer systems that track products through the entirety of the procurement and sales cycle. They can help an Amazon store to make vital business decisions about how much inventory is needed, as well as give information on the optimal inventory levels. Other more advanced inventory management systems can even automate ordering as well as clearance and liquidation of old inventory.
Finding the right system for inventory management can help you maintain a much more accurate picture of what your business situation is regarding your inventory so that you can run your business more efficiently and effectively. Inventory management systems are a considerably wide and varied group of systems, with the simplest being a manual count and ledger, even a spreadsheet, while the most sophisticated will be more of an all-in-one automated solution.
Finding the right system for your needs can be challenging, and making the wrong choice can result in considerable sums being spent on a system that won’t benefit your business significantly. Things to consider when looking at a potential inventory management solution include:
Inventory management services do just about anything you need them to do in the pursuit of inventory management. They will help you build and maintain relationships with suppliers, as well as help you monitor your sell-through rate so that inventory shipments can be planned accordingly. They will also help provide you with detailed reports and metrics concerning your inventory utilization rates and other important indicators of proper inventory management.
The biggest thing that your Amazon inventory management service can do for you and your brand is to let you grow and develop without having to worry about the hassle and minutiae of inventory management. You can focus on building your brand, growing your audience, and evolving your marketing strategy. Since you won’t be weighed down with the headaches of inventory management, you’ll find that your free time has increased and you can devote more meaningful attention to other business matters.
The vast majority of Amazon wholesale providers if you can find any, do not pack and prep your items. Most send your products directly to the seller. This means that the seller might have to be inspected, folded, polybagged and shipped in compliance with Amazon standards.
Many wholesale providers source their products from a variety of sources including, Alibaba. In a recent article by Techcrunch author (Liao, 2021), noted that Amazon has long standing policies regarding authenticity and that Amazon takes swift action against those that violate them.
When issues arise such as clients messages regarding products or notifications from Amazon, good luck getting these issues resolved in a timely manner.
Many Amazon Wholesale providers do not own their own warehouse. If the Amazon wholesale provider does not own their own warehouse, the Amazon seller is at the mercy of the additional third party. This can impact the quality of items on a sales manifest, the price/cost to obtain the items as well as increase the lead time to acquire the items.
Many online shoppers have grown to trust brand names and the marketing, quality, and reviews associated with them. Copies are often viewed as generic by the public.
The vast majority of pack and prep centers do not manage your Amazon store. The Amazon wholesale providers in many instances, do not ship to an Amazon Fulfillment Center, or ship to customers direct via FBM. Many of these Amazon Wholesale providers do not manage your store. Store management activities include uploading items, packing and prepping, repricing of items, listing optimization, reply to customer messages, assist with brand approvals, or add tracking numbers for each individual item shipped.
If Amazon inventory management sounds like it might be a bit complicated, or if you simply want to delegate the task to proven experts that can deftly manage your inventory without a second thought from you, Reach out to The Amazon Junkies today. We’ll listen to your goals and ambitions for your brand, and tell you how we can best help you reach those goals.