If you’re selling any type of product, it’s important to manage your inventory. But, it’s also important to have a Shopify inventory management software that saves you time and money. If you decide to move your ecommerce business to Shopify, a Shopify Inventory Management App makes everything so much easier on you, your staff, and your customers.
Why is Inventory Management Important?
Managing your inventory is one way of keeping your customers happy, because they get exactly what they ordered. But there are other reasons to track your inventory:
1. Avoid Spoilage
If you’re selling any kind of food or drink, expiration dates are a factor. Managing inventory properly will keep your expired products to a minimum.
2. Reduce Dead Stock
Deadstock is the leftover stock that you can’t sell any longer, due to it being out of season, no longer in style, or just not being relevant. Deadstock is a costly inventory mistake but it can be reduced or eliminated with good inventory management practices.
3. Lower Inventory Costs
Depending on what is needed to store your inventory, warehouse, shelving, refrigeration, etc., the cost of having inventory can be high and eat into your profit margin. Costs go up when you have too much inventory and it doesn’t sell. Then you’re stuck spending money on inventory storage over a longer period of time.
4. Better Cash Flow
Good inventory management is cost-efficient on its own, but it also leads to better cash flow in other ways. When inventory sits on the shelf, you’ve paid for it already. You can’t use the inventory to pay your bills. So, it slows down your cash flow overall.
That’s why it’s important to include inventory management in your cash flow management strategy. What you have or don’t have in inventory dictates how much you can sell, and also what you have to buy. If your inventory is well-managed, then your cash flow management improves, too.
The best inventory management system lets you know what you have in stock in real-time. You can use that information to predict what you need to order and when you need to order it.
5. Optimize Fulfillment
There are several tactics you can implement to optimize fulfillment if you have good inventory management.
- You can spread your inventory out to several warehouses to lower delivery time and shipping costs.
- You can also offer a positive return experience to customers and reduce loss by adding usable inventory from returns back into the inventory management system.
Tips for Managing Your Inventory
Here are some tips to better manage your inventory.
- Categorize your inventory: Group products by price and how quickly they sell.
- Update inventory records in real-time: Know exactly how much you need to sell or order.
- Do regular periodic inventory audits: Audits can be monthly, weekly, or daily, but making them a regular occurrence helps keep inventory accurate.
- Review supplier performance: A bad supplier impacts your business. Discuss problems with them or find a new vendor if you can’t resolve problems.
- Assign inventory management to one go-to person: In a growing company, having a single person in charge of inventory helps ensure that there is at least one person who knows everything related to inventory.
- Focus on customer satisfaction: Inventory should be managed with the customer in mind. While lowering inventory is cost-effective, lowering it too much means a longer lead time for customers.
- Invest in good inventory technology: Your inventory management technology will scale with you as you grow and add vendors and warehouses.
Best Shopify Inventory Management App — Ordoro
Ordoro is the best Shopify inventory management software for ecommerce. Ordoro’s features make inventory management with Shopify so much easier and more accurate.
Automatically Track and Sync All Your Inventory Levels
Ordoro gives you a central hub for all your inventory matters. You can plug each channel into Ordoro including marketplaces, web stores, and suppliers, connecting your multichannel business to one inventory.
Add multiple warehouses, whether it’s your garage, Fulfillment by Amazon, a dropshipper, or all of the above — then select which warehouse to ship orders from.
Ordoro keeps track of your inventory by updating and syncing it across your entire network whenever an order is processed.
Create and Send Out Purchase Orders When You Need to Restock
Assign each product to their appropriate supplier in bulk. Once the product is identified, you can easily resupply your inventory with a few clicks. You can also strategically oversell as much product as you want, and place a backorder with your suppliers.
Bundle Multiple SKUs into One Unit for Sale
Organize bundling with Ordoro’s built-in kitting engine so you can bundle multiple products into a single unit for sale. These can be related products, products with several components, or products with varying quantities. Ordoro will continue to monitor your inventory levels.
Use Barcode Scanning to Reduce Fulfillment Errors
Ordoro helps reduce costly inventory errors with the use of barcode scanning. Ordoro supports UPC barcodes allowing you to scan, set, and search UPC codes within Ordoro. You can also tag products with aisle and bin locations.
Pick and Pack Errors Will Plummet
Ordoro’s barcode scanning feature reduces costly fulfillment errors. You can select one or multiple orders, then the app pulls up items to be picked, scanned, and packed. Orders are marked as complete after all items are processed.
Access Ordoro’s API
As your business scales, you can work with our API to construct the integration needed, for a new sales channel, supplier, a 3PL, or third-party app.
Manage a Multi-Warehouse Inventory
Ordoro acts as a central hub for managing inventory no matter where you actually store the products. Your inventory will adjust for every transaction no matter where it is fulfilled. Every channel will receive the updated inventory count.
Give Vendors Access with Vendor Portals
Instead of sending orders to vendors, they can access them from Ordoro’s vendor portal. Their access is restricted to their orders only so they can fill and ship right from Ordoro.
Get Access to Supplier Feeds
Adding supplier feeds gives you access to their inventory and inner workings so you can see if and when they can fulfill your orders.
Top-Notch Customer Support
Ordoro’s support team walked the path alongside us and helped us learn the software, explore and implement customizations, and improve efficiency in our daily operations.
Kitsbow
Ordoro offers lifetime customer support. You’ll always talk to an actual Ordoro employee when you contact Customer Support. Ordoro’s support starts at onboarding and continues thereafter.
Listen to Ordoro’s Customers
Ordoro’s inventory management system has completely revolutionized the way we keep track of inventory and ship orders. We went from manually entering information in excel spreadsheets to Ordoro’s automated fulfillment process. It has helped us be more accurate and provide even better customer service. Thanks Ordoro!
Jacki A.
Kitsbow needed a shipping and inventory management software that would:
- Integrate with Shopify
- Be easy to use
- Be affordable
- Be quick to set up
- Help them with their own manufacturing
Ordoro met all of these requirements.
Kitsbow utilizes barcode scanning verification to ensure pick and pack errors are at a minimum.
Ordoro’s order verification process is a key factor that empowers our distribution center team members to consistently exceed the goal of 90% average rate of accuracy in order fulfillment.
In 2020 the Kitsbow Distribution had a 99.96% average accuracy rate for the year.
Want to Learn More?
Talk to our product experts to learn more about how Ordoro can help your company improve your inventory management with the best Shopify Inventory Management App.
