How to Use Shopify Inventory Management to Handle Your Business Operations

Do you find yourself overstocking on some items and out-of-stock on others?  Do you know which products are your best selling and which are your least popular? All retail stores need to track their inventory and be able to manage their store with ease. Pen and paper approach doesn’t cut it anymore with how  rapidly growing our technology world. Luckily, Shopify can easily help you manage most of the important inventory management needs. Let’s take a look at how you can take the hassle out of your everyday business operations.

The Importance of Inventory Management

You already know how easily it is to lose money with poor inventory management. Scary business for any business owner.
Just a few of the significant benefits a properly managed inventory can bring you include:
~ Avoiding over-stocking on products
~ Keeping up with technology – kicking the pen and paper inventory record to the side
~ Ruling out chances of wasting money on your least popular products
~ Improving efficiency and productivity by implementing devices such as barcode scanners
~ Eliminating error-ridden manual processes
~ Creating loyal and repeat customers by keeping favorite products in-stock

Managing You Inventory with Shopify

Having a proper inventory management system in place helps easily track tricky variations of a single product. Using Shopify, you will have the availability to offer any number of versions for a single product to reflect different sizes, materials, colors, and more!

Assigning Barcodes to Your Products

Depending on your business and the amount of inventory, assigning barcodes to your products will bring simplicity to your store. Whether your products have existing barcodes or you need to create original barcodes for new inventory you plan to stock, Shopify lets you do both! Get Shopify’s wifeless barcode scanner to help keep track of every product you sell instantly on the spot, anywhere if you’re selling in-person.

Setting up Products

There’s more to a sturdy inventory management than simply assigning barcodes and naming each product. Classifications of your store’s products will greatly improve management. Shopify lets you categorize your products into categories such as: season, sale, type and more. They organize these groupings through collections. For example, if you’re selling sandals, you might want to categorize them in a summer collection. Or, perhaps, you’re store’s inventory includes iPhone cases, you could consider categorizing them into a collection based on their material. You can start to automate the organization process when you use smart collections to sort products according to price, vendor and inventory level.

Tracking Inventory Levels

Failing to track inventory levels can be a huge blow  out to your online or retail business. You may have experienced it; an excited customer is shopping, sees an amazing product on your store and completes check out. Only for you to realize the product is out of stock! Then begins the hassle of contacting them via email, explaining the situation, refunding them… not a pleasant experience for anyone. You can eliminate this problem using Shopify. You’ll be able to flawlessly track stock level, set up automated reminders to place orders with your supplier, or to manufacture more products when the count hits a certain number, and update inventory numbers when you receive a new shipment.
Note: Want to continue to sell an item, even when it’s out of stock? You can indicate longer shipping times on the product page to enable this feature.

Gaining Insight into Your Inventory and Sales

Do you know your best selling products? Your least popular items? Does your inventory management reflect these trends? Shopify’s inventory management system helps you track exactly how your inventory is moving. This is important because it can help you plan for future orders, forecast sales, create successful marketing campaigns and design special promotions around your inventory numbers. Bonus: If you have a Professional plan or higher, you can see a full report of sales by product with reports too!

Added Functionality with Apps

Whatever you can think of that might make your life easier when it comes to managing your inventory, chances are the Shopify App Store has it. They offer numerous inventory apps and plugins to choose from. This allows you to sell across multiple channels, set up reminders, automatically request product reviews from customers and so much more. A popular app on Shopify App Store is “Back in Stock”. This feature enables visitors to get instantly notified when the product is back in stock. While the product page is still getting traffic, this allows your products that are out of stock to still be available as a popular product. Simply hit Get App, installation takes no longer than 30 seconds, and hit a button saying ’email me when available’ will immediately appear on all relevant product pages.

In Conclusion, Shopify’s inventory management system can help seamlessly improve with your everyday business operation. Take action, get organized, and start selling! Have any tips and tricks of your own on keeping an organized inventory management? Let us know in the comments below!