When you’re getting started as an eCommerce business, one of the most common issues you’re likely to face is inventory management. Managing your inventory is easy enough when your business is still relatively small, but what about when you bring in more customers or you want to branch out to multiple stores?

Poorly managing your inventory can hinder business growth, so if this is something you’re currently struggling with, you’ll want to address any issues you’re dealing with as soon as possible. Keep reading to learn about X common eCommerce inventory problems and how to fix them.

Overselling Due to Poor Stock Tracking

If you’re inaccurately counting your stock, there’s a good chance that you’ll end up overselling your products, much to the frustration of your customers.

You can avoid this by using real-time inventory syncing across all your stores. Tools like Syncio automate your stock counts across multiple stores on Shopify and WooCommerce, saving you the hassle of doing it yourself and the likelihood of making mistakes.

Stockouts That Drive Customers Away

Even if you’re not overselling, failing to manage your stock properly increases the risk of running out of popular products. This is another issue that’ll frustrate your customers, possibly even driving them to order from one of your competitors instead.

Your stock management process should involve forecasting demand by checking your historical sales data and taking seasonal trends into account. The good news is that plenty of inventory management tools do this for you, so you don’t have to sit scratching your head at spreadsheet figures for hours.

Excess Stock Tying Up Cash Flow

Overordering stock is just as problematic as underordering. Not only does it eat into your profits and storage space, but there’s also the potential that you can’t shift the stock at all, so you end up having to sell it off for cheap in a sale.

The simple way to avoid overstocking is to improve your demand planning and clearance strategies. Again, you don’t have to do all the calculations yourself, as inventory management systems and point-of-sale systems exist for this purpose.

Difficulty Managing Returns and Restocking

You might think you’re managing your inventory pretty well, but the moment a customer returns something, your systems get thrown out of whack. If your existing returns processes are poor, you’re probably going to experience stock losses.

You can solve this issue by creating clear return workflows that make it easy to track your restocked items accurately.

Failing to Adjust for Seasonal or Sales Events

Finally, not being prepared for high-demand periods can cause chaos in your eCommerce store, not to mention the disappointment of losing out on dozens of sales because you didn’t anticipate the seasonal popularity of certain products.

Advertising stock for seasonal or sales events isn’t something you should leave to the last minute. Make sure you order in your stock well in advance of major promotions, so you can take advantage of lucrative sales opportunities.

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