Maintaining a balanced and accurate inventory record is one of the most important steps in any business, including retail. By keeping track of your products, you can be sure everything is on-hand whenever necessary and provide customers with what they need. And this Blog will help you achieve that.
But before moving forward, let’s first see what inventory management is.
What is Retail Inventory Management?
Retail inventory management is the process of handling, ordering, storing and managing a company’s non-capitalized products. This also involves raw materials and components for a few businesses, while most organizations deal with finished stock items ready for sale.
The goal of inventory management is to ensure that the right amount of inventory is maintained and the cost of goods sold on a business's balance sheet are reduced.
There are several techniques that retailers can use to manage their inventory, including
- In-store Tracking: With in-store tracking software, retailers can track individual items as they move through the store. They can determine which items are selling well and need to be reordered.
- Stock Rotation: To avoid over-ordering, retailers use inventory rotation. It helps stores keep stock fresh and reduce the number of times an item needs to be stocked. It can also help improve customer service by ensuring customers have more access to current stock in styles and colors.
- Warehousing: If a retailer doesn’t have enough space in its store to keep all of its inventory, it may need to hire or outsource managing its inventory to a warehouse. Warehouses offer lower storage rates and faster shipping than traditional stores.
Importance of Inventory Management in Retail
Not having enough inventory in store, waiting time for reordering stocks, product spoilage, and decreased profits are reasons why inventory management in retail has become an essential aspect for retail stores across the globe.
If too much of a product is available, it can lead to increased inventory and lower sales revenue. If too little of a product is available, it can lead to inventory shortages and higher sales costs.
All these factors ultimately help companies in reducing out-of-the-stock scenarios and increasing profits.
How Retail Inventory Management Differs From Traditional Inventory Management
Retail inventory management is focused on products that are sold to the public. Manufactory and warehouse inventories take different approaches to inventory items, but they can easily be adapted for retail-specific implementations.
Retail inventory management includes deciding which products you sell and determining when you should sell them. This is done by evaluating how the demand fluctuates with this structure of peak seasons.
How Often Do Retail Stores Stock Inventory?
When it comes to retail inventory management, the answer to this question is crucial. Many stores believe they should take inventory weekly, but this is unnecessary.
A good rule of thumb is to take inventory at least once a month, ideally every two weeks. This way, you will always have an accurate picture of what’s available, and you can adjust your inventory accordingly.
What are the Best practices for Retail Inventory Management?
When managing inventory, you should keep a few best practices in mind.
Track retail inventory efficiently.
If you have accurate inventory control, you can effectively manage your inventory. Additionally, ensure that your shelves are evenly stocked and that all items are correctly labeled.
There are two inventory tracking options: keeping track of everything or simply tracking the items you’re currently working on.
You can use an app like Axonator’s real inventory management app to keep track of inventory levels and sales. This is a good option if you want to keep track of detailed information about each product.
The app also comes with a QR-code system to track store product quantities. Using a scan, you can log or access complete information like product quantity, name, numbers, expiration date, etc.
Creating content consistently ensures your website and blog have accurate information. Plus, it lowers the costs related to incorrect information.
Track Inventory Location
Increasing your inventory efficiency will allow you to track where all of your products are and buy the ones that the customers want. This will give you a better view of your stock, inventory location, and logistics planning.
Keep a Record of Defective Stocks
One of the essential aspects of managing inventory is keeping track of defective stocks. This involves tracking all the faulty products in your store so that you can find and fix them as quickly as possible. This will help you keep your shelves clean and reduce the amount of wasted product.
Plan and Adjust Proper Inventory Cycles
Adjust your inventory cycles appropriately to keep your store in stock and generate the most revenue possible. Here are three tips to help you change your inventory cycles:
1. Know your Customer Base – When you know what types of products your customers are most likely to buy, you can better predict when they’ll need to buy more of those products. This information can help you adjust your inventory accordingly.
2. Be Mindful of Seasonal Trends – Certain items, like sweaters in the winter, tend to sell out quickly. By understanding these trends, you can be better prepared to adjust your inventory as needed.
3. Plan Ahead– A good plan for how much product you’ll need in each category will help you decide when to order new inventory and reduce or eliminate stock from your store.
Axonator for Retail Inventory Management
Fortune 500 companies across the globe can use Axonator for streamlined inventory management without requiring coding knowledge. Retail organizations can use our no-code platform to ensure that all transactions are high quality. Our platform also has various features designed to meet any company's needs.
Axonator has tons of applications. Aside from helping companies in retail inventory management, it can also streamline other processes like retail store audits, compliance, surveys, and management of retail facilities.
Numerous industries and organizations use Axonator to automate field workflows, achieving digital transformation in record time and cost.
Why Axonator?
- World’s first mobile-focused & Highly customizable no-code architecture to support real-world scenarios.
- Deploy enterprise-grade solutions rapidly as per unique requirements
- Achieve paperless retail inventory management
- Generate reports automatically and automated data collection for trends and analytics
- Streamline processes and implements a fully automated system using Axonator’s MicroApp strategy within weeks.
Available on Android, iOS, and the web, Axonator is a highly customizable no-code field workflow automation platform mainly used to transform your paper and spreadsheet-based manual processes and improve retail inventory management in numerous industries.
Axonator offers several simple and ready-to-use enterprise-grade apps for field workflows like inspections, audits, facilities management, and work orders that organizations can use to replace paper, spreadsheet & cumbersome desktop-based manual processes with mobile & tablet apps.