Amazon Inventory Management: The Do’s And Don’ts!

Selling on Amazon seems an easy task for new sellers. As a new seller, what you overlook is the fact that prior to starting on Amazon, you must understand the best practices for Amazon inventory management. Comprehending the do’s and don’ts is easy, right? But the challenging part is managing the inventory on your own which requires skills and experience. 

Inventory management may not be an exciting task but it is certainly significant. One slight mistake may attract a negative impact on your business. There is no sugarcoating the truth that even experienced sellers on Amazon find inventory management challenging and tedious. Therefore, most business owners look for Amazon data upload services. Having professionals manage their inventory ensures the utmost accuracy in crafting product listings. 

Even if you go for outsourcing inventory management services, you must understand why inventory management is so important for sellers on Amazon. Also, what you should do and what to avoid while leveraging this online marketplace for your business. So, let’s get to this:

It Is A Sin To Go Out Of Stock While Selling On Amazon

• Low Sales: Amazon inventory management is a crucial component of your business. Why? Because online marketplaces have impatient customers who may not wait calmly for your product to be available. Amazon shoppers will just look for a substitute which means going to your competitors. This will cause you to lose sales and cash flow. 

• Negative Impact On Rankings: If you’re out of stock for a long period of time or facing this issue on a regular basis, it will lead to a significant drop in your keyword ranking. Keyword rankings play a major role in making your products visible to the customers. Thus, it will largely affect your sales even when your product comes back in stock. Sure, giveaways and sponsored ads are a substitute to regain ground. But, the poor sales history will leave you operating with less money due to lost revenue.

• Less Search Visibility:  Amazon eliminates all those product listings that are without stock from its search result pages. It does not remove the amazon product listing permanently. You may still find it live somewhere on the marketplace. But, deleting it from search results means it will have a lot less visibility.

What makes Amazon the world’s best marketplace is prompt and seamless access to millions of products. Thus, if you miss out on aptly managing your inventory, you’re sure missing out on a myriad of sales opportunities.

Overpacking Your Inventory With Products Isn’t Good Either

Sure, going out of stock makes you lose sales opportunities. But, having products more than necessary or having stale and stagnant inventory will also cost you. Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA) charges a long-term storage fee (LTSF) of $3.45 per cubic foot on such an inventory. Every 15th of each month FBA conducts an inventory cleanup to check up on the products that are being inactive in its warehouse. Inventory that has been sitting for about 181 to 365 days incur the said charges. 

Those items that are unsaleable for more than 365 days on the inventory cleanup date will either incur double LTSF, i.e. $6.90 per cubic foot or a minimum fee of $0.50 per unit per month. Whichever is greater in amount will be charged to idle inventories. Thus, it is better to keep all the relevant stuff and keep going. 

Do Keep A Track Of Your Requirements 

While going out of stock is a sin, overfilling your inventory is no good either. Now, how to stock the inventory? How to identify a healthy number that allows re-ordering stock while still continuing to fulfill orders. What you should do is:

• Strategically plan your inventory orders by carefully keeping a check on lead times (the duration counting from the day when you place an order to the day when the item is ready for purchase) and anticipated sales. 

• Analyze your historical sales data for inventory forecasting. However, if you don’t have sufficient data for analysis, you can check out your competitors’ sales trends to make the most accurate sales predictions. Keeping a track of past sales estimates for your products will give you insights on how the products have performed in the past compared to how they are performing now.

Having a record and analyzing historical data will help you accurately predict how the market will behave in the future. Further, based on the estimates you can add the right amount of products in stock, ideally resulting in more sales and more cash flow.

Tip: The nature of the market keeps on changing and so is the demand for products. This results in fluctuating stock needs during peak season. Do not miss to keep a track of seasonal demand.

Do Leverage Seller Central To Manage Your Inventory

Seller Central offers various free tools to FBA sellers that can help with your Amazon inventory management. You can easily perform routine inventory management tasks like:

• View and sort inventory
• Create, copy and edit listings
• Manage pricing
• Add and eliminate images
• Close and delete listings

You also get frequent suggestions on products that need restocking, order quantities and reorder dates. It further provides inputs on your specific lead time and product volume through which you can manage inventory and your supplier orders. 

Final Thoughts

What you need is an Amazon inventory management strategy that will help you to streamline your stock needs and maximize sales. However, when you have thousands of products, it is just not feasible to manage their SKUs. There are automated inventory management software tools available but relying on them blindly may not be a good option. 

Thus, most sellers go for outsourcing Amazon data entry services to manage their inventories. Hiring Amazon data upload experts is a better option as they manually manage SKUs, monitor inventory levels, sales volume and lead times to make informed decisions about any new inventory shipments. They provide quality service to maximize your sales and profits by meeting inventory demands head-on. 
Looking for reliable professionals to take care of your inventory requirements? Drop an email to info@data-entry-india.com and get a free consultation for amazon inventory management services.