If you are an ecommerce store owner you must be aware that an efficient supply chain is key to the growth of an ecommerce business. The way you manage your products as it moves from your suppliers to your warehouse to end customers is what gives you the leverage to keep your prices low and still make profits.
And a robust inventory management system is what it takes to manage your supply chain efficiently. The more you automate your inventory management system, the better it works for you.
Why Logistics & Inventory Management is Important?
There’s no denying the fact that ecommerce logistics is the backbone of any ecommerce business.
According to a research done by Aberdeen Group, industry leaders are:
- 1.7 times more likely to find and access inbound supply chain data (procurement) needed for decision making;
- 1.67 times more likely to have logistics/pipeline collaboration with suppliers;
- 1.34 times more likely to have online visibility into in-transit shipment status.
Not only that, top performers are also 87% more likely to have established mobile technologies in place for critical business functions.
There’s abundant research to support two facts:
- That Inventory (or logistics) management and automation is the most critical (and often ignored) aspect of managing an ecommerce business.
- That mobile accessibility gives a competitive edge.
How Can An Inventory Management Software Can Help?
All good inventory management software have some features that can streamline your supply chain, reduce operational costs and increase revenue. These may or may not include the following.
Stock Management – A best inventory management software will help you keep track of your stocks. You will be notified if any product is about to go out of stock. So you can keep your stock levels maintained and will never lose customers because your products are out of stock. A stock management system will also let you track the movement of stocks in real time.
Order Management – Order management is another area where automation through a software can help immensely. An order management system will keep track of all the orders placed in your online store and give you the order fulfillment status along with all the customer details. So you will never delay an order or fail to fulfill an order because you weren’t informed of the order in time.
Warehouse Management – If you supply your products from multiple warehouses, a warehouse management system will come in handy. It will keep you updated on the stock levels in various warehouses and assign orders to warehouses which have enough stock. This way if you run out of stock in one warehouse you can assign the order to another warehouse.
Supplier Management – With a supplier management system you can add/remove suppliers from your store, edit supplier information banking information, payment terms, etc and the product assigned to them.
Automated Reporting – A good inventory management system will also give you automated reports on orders, sales, products ordered, orders fulfilled, orders pending, etc from a single dashboard.
If your store is on Magento, one of the most popular ecommerce platforms, Biztech has a readymade inventory management Magento extension (along with a free mobile app!) that can take care of all your supply chain bottlenecks.
