All ecommerce business strive for achieving notable success. Online businesses that achieves this goal often segregate their activities and end up having various web stores and warehouses serving a large number of customers in various locations. Shockingly, many business owners fail to notice an important part of their business: tracking and recording their inventory. Did you know this common mistake cost retailers a staggering $1.75 trillion dollars annually?(http://acctivate.com) Without an accurate view of inventory levels and multi-location support, your business is at risk for stock-outs, unnecessary holding costs, overselling, and potential overstocking.
Why Efficient Inventory Management is Essential
Expansion in the number of warehouses adds supplementary costs such as workforce and inventory management, maintenance and other related expenses. But there are can be several reasons for businesses to have numerous warehouses at a single instance. Sellers may obtain orders from various parts of the country or even from other continents. Web store managers can ensure quick shipment of goods by arranging the delivery from the nearest warehouse. Considering the presence of international shoppers, it’s a profitable idea to have warehouses in more than one country to subtract extra shipping charges and lessen the delivery time.
Inventory management may be a puzzling thought for new establishments, but business growth imposes extra demands on these activities. Hence, established businesses may find themselves in a tight spot when it comes to efficient inventory management. That’s why paying attention to inventory management from early stages of development is an absolute must for those businesses that aspire to become big.
Magento Warehouse Management with Multi-Location Inventory
Ecommerce business owners that use a default Magento configuration often fail to proficiently operate inventory in their store. Thus, Multi-Location Inventory, an extension for Magento that completely solves problems of Magento warehouse management.
Common Use Cases:
Managing Multiple Warehouses in Different Countries
Web store targeting shoppers in different countries generally establish their warehouses not too far from the local sites. Though, the default Magento doesn’t let store managers monitor stock levels accurately. Customize extension can aid you efficiently organize inventories from a single location by creating separate inventories for each location.
Multi-Location Inventory can be utilized for other purposes, as well. For example, you can keep your fingers on the pulse of seasonal trends in demand in each country, since by keeping track of stock levels. Moreover, you can find out customer preferences and their changes in each season. You can necessarily take advantage of this data while optimizing inventory levels at your warehouses, thus reducing your storage cost.
Working with International Customers
Let us assume that you have two online stores catering customers in three countries (Spain, United States and Canada) and you own two warehouses. One of these warehouses is in Spain and another one is in United States. What would you do to ensure timely delivery? It’s viable to source Spanish clients with goods stored in the Spanish warehouse, and ship goods from the United States warehouse to American and Canadian clients.
Use Magento extension to make inventories distinct on a website level by developing three websites and splitting one of them into two store views with a common inventory. Hence, you’ll be able to manage each inventory separately. Additionally, advance Magento inventory management can help you to perform up-to date inventory tracking.
- Providing Customers from Different Websites with the Product from the Same Warehouse
Several products are not popular and customers rarely buy them. But it doesn’t means that web store owners have to stop selling these items. They can store them in one location and ship these products as soon as someone orders them.
Opt for multi-location inventory tool to place items in a so-called default stock and manage their inventory as a whole. In such scenarios for a specific product it can allow to set warehouse level, minimum quantity for warehouse in and default warehouse – which will be considered to be the primary warehouse for product delivery.
- Simultaneous Update of Inventory Attributes on all Devices
According to one research, “By 2018, only 12% of respondents expect to use pen and paper-based processes; 66% plan to use handheld mobile computers with real-time access to WMS systems”. From demands spurred by the rise of the on-demand consumer and big data, to the growing presence of automation and mobility on the warehouse floor, it is expected that mobile will be a key tool through which inventory management will be performed.
By using, Magento inventory extension you don’t have to bother about maintaining your Magento store and mobile app separately. All the modifications you make to your Magento store will be automatically updated on your Magento inventory mobile app in real time. This tool comes with barcode scanner support to update stock inventory directly to warehouse through mobile.
Conclusion
The significance of efficient inventory management cannot be underestimated. It is essential to regularly optimize stock levels, maintain sales records and reduce operating costs in order to gain more profits. The default Magento provides basic inventory management capabilities and it doesn’t meet all the needs of bigger stores with warehouses spread across different locations.
In order to compete in this fast changing e-commerce business, it is essential to have advance Magento warehouse management. The tool which is easily compatible with your present e-commerce website, has mobile operability, supports multi location, tracks accurate live sales updates, supports customer and supplier management.
If you’re searching for a robust tool to accelerate, expand and improve your Magento warehouse management processes, MageMob is ready to offer you with one. Our extension also supports Magento 2.
