The other day, I was chatting with a customer who said something that transformed my view on inventory. He said: “If I run out of stock on Amazon, I'm screwed. But I love running out of stock on Shopify.”
That’s right. He used the ‘L’ word to refer to stockouts. A problem known for contributing to nearly $2 trillion in inventory costs. Clearly, I needed to know more.
If you’re here, you know stockouts can harm your business in more ways than one.
Whether it’s maintaining your marketplace rankings, protecting your market share, or scaling your revenue to $10M and beyond, keeping your business free from stockouts can help you get there faster.
But in order to avoid stockouts, you first need to understand how they impact your business. Let’s get started.
Stockouts and overstocks are part of the game in modern commerce. But that doesn’t mean you can’t control their impact on your business.
As a retailer, it’s your job to make sure you have enough of your bestsellers to satisfy demand, while avoiding the trap of overstocked inventory.
Today, we’re taking a closer look at the risks involved with stockouts and overstocks, and sharing practical tips to help you strike the right balance.
If you’re here, you know your inventory mistakes are costing you a lot more than lost or deferred transactions.
Inventory constraints like low inventory, stockouts, and overstocks, can do long-term damage to your margins and future sales. For some, it can take weeks or even months to recover from a single miscalculation in your forecasts.
So, how do you fix it? The solution to inventory problems doesn’t stop at better forecasting. It’s a combination of better planning, better visibility, and quick course correction.
Let’s break it down.
Imagine waking up to discover that just 17 of your 220 SKUs generated 80% of your profits. For Flieber CEO Fabricio Miranda, this was one of many harsh reality checks in his past e-commerce career.
From that moment on, he began to manage his brand as a portfolio of products, carefully considering the lifecycle phase of each one to maximize growth and profitability
Because the truth is, the steps that got you to early success with a couple of products, aren’t enough to build an enduring brand. As a product matures, you need different strategies to stay...
With a couple of best-selling products under your belt, you’re ready for the next phase of e-commerce growth. But with each new product you launch comes a host of new challenges.
Suddenly, you’re dealing with new suppliers, varying lead times, and unpredictable sales patterns.
To keep your retail operations running smoothly, you need a central source of truth for understanding what's happening with your inventory today and what will happen in the future.
If you’re like most retailers, you’re losing sales in more ways than you think.
Understanding your lost sales isn’t just about tallying up the number of times you sold less than you should have because you stocked out.
No matter what or where you sell, customer returns, backorders, missed conversions, and lost rankings can all have an impact on your brand’s current and future sales.
To scale your revenue and protect your investment in customer acquisition, here are five things you don’t want to overlook when measuring lost sales.
In a perfect world, you’d always have enough inventory to fulfill all your sales.
But this is the real world. And here, you have to be extremely good at projecting future sales if you want to make sure you don’t run out of stock.
In business, there’s nothing like the pain of knowing you could be making more money than you already are.
Managing inventory is arguably the hardest task of any retail brand. That is especially true for e-commerce, where sales, advertising, payments and even the customers are digital and can be managed with the click of a button, while inventory is still physical and needs real-world interactions to be produced, moved and stored.
