Category: Inventory

From Amazon to Shopify and beyond, no matter which corner of commerce you operate in, you lose sales when your products go out of stock.

Every year, retailers lose an estimated $1.8 trillion due to inventory mismanagement. That’s roughly 7.8% of total global retail sales.

At Flieber, our team has onboarded over 3 million SKUs. We’ve found that the number for this subset of products is even more drastic: our calculations point to an average of 11.2% in lost sales. 

To understand the impact of these numbers on your own business, let me tell you the tale...

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.

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...

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.

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. 

In the cutthroat game of e-commerce, it’s all about keeping costs down and margins up.

Every day, in every media outlet, you’ll see articles discussing retail companies with overstock inventory. Even large brands are still working to balance their inventory levels post pandemic, with 66% of owners and executives reporting overstocks.

To solve this problem, brands often fall back on what they do best: drive more sales. 

Markdowns, promotions, and clearance sales are the default methods for offloading excess inventory. But these approaches can have a major impact on your margins.

The truth is, profitable scaling starts long before the point...

According to some estimates, there are over 12 million e-commerce companies worldwide. In other words, the landscape is crowded.