Stock control issues and how to overcome them

When running an online store, the more places you sell your products, the more money you are going to generate for your business. However, managing your business across a number of different platforms can bring about a number of different issues which will affect the ability for your store to run efficiently. The major problem that people find when running a bricks and mortar business, as well as an online store across multiple channels, comes in the ability to effectively manage your stock levels.

As you are selling products in many places simultaneously, you can often find it difficult to keep track of where each product is being sold and how much of each product you have left. If you lose track of how many items you have left in stock, you may end up selling a product online when you don't actually have it is stock to be able to deliver to the customer. This is known as overselling and is one of the major problems in stock management. 

Problems of overselling

While you don't actually lose any products from overselling, you are not making any money either as you are unable to complete an order. Taking someone's money and being unable to then provide them with a product is could possibly give the impression that you are trying to scam the customer out of their money. This will seriously damage your brand image and gain a public perception as being untrustworthy. 

Not only that, if you are unable to fulfil an order, it will force the the customer to visit a rival competitor in order to purchase the product. In future when comparing the quality of service between you and your rival, that customer will then decide to make all future purchases from that competitor.

Solutions to overselling

If you do have a business that is selling across multiple channels and sometimes find managing stock levels difficult, there two solutions you can look to carry out in order to fix this. The first option is to simply hire more people whose sole job is to monitor stock levels. This will mean that they keep track of how much stock is left for each product and order more stock before you run out. This will mean that overselling will never be a problem as your inventory levels will never get low enough for this to be an issue. However, employing someone full time to carry out this task can cost you more than you may be willing to pay to solve this issue. 

The other option would be to purchase some ecommerce software that has a built in stock synchronisation feature. What this feature does is monitor your stock across all of your online platforms and when one product is sold on a particular platform, it updates the total remaining inventory across all of the other platforms. If you run a bricks and mortar store in addition to online platforms, you can also include the inventory in your shop into the software but you may have to enter these numbers manually if you do not have an automated system in your store. 

As we at eSellution have worked with many clients in helping them set up an ecommerce store, we have found that if you are a small business, using ecommerce software to solve this issue going to be the best way to go. It is easy to implement and requires no effort on your part. What's more, it costs substantially less than it would do if you were to employ someone to carry out this task on your behalf.  

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Stock control issues and how to stop them occuring

When managing a small ecommerce business, stock level management is of vital importance. This is because every item you have signifies profit for your business. If you are a recently formed business, or your profit margins are currently rather tight, the profit from just one product can determine whether your figures are in the black or the red for that month.

The high value placed on your items underlines the importance in having good stock management. If you have a business that sells items in a high street store and online across various ecommerce platforms, you may find it difficult to actually keep track of much stock you have left. This is one of the main stock control issues for any business as, if you don't keep track of exactly how much stock you have left, you may find yourself overselling a product.

Overselling means essentially what you are doing is still selling a product to customers despite already running out of stock. This will cause two rather large issues for your business. Firstly, overselling a product is going to mean not only will you miss out on being able to fulfil that particular order, you will also be unable to complete all future orders for that product until you have received more stock. Secondly, if a customer purchases an item only to be then told that they actually can't have it because there is no stock left, despite receiving no notification when they originally purchased the item, that customer is going to grow annoyed with the business and is likely to leave your store to purchase the item from somewhere else.

Poor stock control seriously tarnishes the reputation of a business.  Particularly with online ecommerce stores, the key to success relies on creating a reliable and trustworthy image with your customers. If your store is unable to fulfil basic orders due to poor stock management, it's going to damage this image right from the start and will most likely result in you losing future customers. 

How to solve stock control issues

If you find that you are struggling to keep track of which items are selling where and how much stock you have left, the best option for you would be to purchase some stock synchronisation software for your business. What this essentially does is monitor your current stock levels across all of your sales platforms, so  when one product is sold on a particular platform, your remaining stock levels are then updated across the rest of the platforms. This instant update in stock levels will mean that once an items stock does run out, all of your platforms will notify customers that this item is currently unavailable. However, as a business owner you should never let your stock levels get to that stage. As the stock synchronisation software will allow you to instantly see how much stock you have remaining, you now need to be looking ahead to see when your business will run out of stock. This will allow you to order more stock before you do run out so that once the stock levels do get low, more stock will arrive to replenish your numbers. This way you allow your business to keep selling products, keeping your customers happy with your store. Everyone wins!

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