How Often Should You Organize And Update Your Online Store Inventory?
Virtual sales can make business easy – for some, maybe too easy. When a small business adds online transactions, the sales can happen without them checking the inventory. As such, managing, organizing, and updating your online product numbers can slide.
Precise inventory management is essential to online success. Knowing how to manage online store inventory lets small businesses avoid costly inventory issues that can leave them rushing to fulfill orders – or canceling them altogether.
Organization Should Be Ongoing
A good website attracts customers, but organization can keep them. People rarely land on the one product they want to buy immediately – they want to search through the inventory, jump from one product to the next, and see the other options until they find the perfect fit. It’s a good reason to keep like products together.
When adding to your online store inventory, make sure that the products fit into appropriate lists. Using specific categories and tags to group similar goods and services will help both you and the customer keep track of them. When you categorize items, the customer does not have to worry about hunting down other products or alternative selections that would pique their interest.
Not only is this part of top-notch customer service, but it can lead to more conversions. It’s also a pretty simple process and something you’re already doing in your physical store!
Organizing Your Online Store Is The Same As Your Warehouse Or Store Shelves
When you’re hunting for a product in the back or on your shelves, you know where to look. You have the stock separated by type, brand, and more categories so that it’s easier for you and your customers. A well-made online store does this with categories and tags as part of its SEO practices, but it makes for a better shopping experience.
Tags and categories are like your shelving system – they make the ongoing organization of your online store a much easier activity. You can also make use of this system for other promotions: set up a discount or coupon for specific items, promote a collection in an email or online flyer, or other bulk actions to your products.
As you move more products digitally, you have to think about the best ways to update your online inventory. What used to be a chore can now happen instantaneously!
How Often Should I Update My Online Inventory?
It used to be that updating an online inventory was a slow process. Manually sorting through sales and deducting the numbers from your physical inventory can be a slow, cumbersome process that’s prone to errors. Your online inventory should reflect what you have in stock. It’s easy to do when you sync your online point of sale with your physical one!
Dedicated point-of-sale systems maintain a product catalogue and inventory counts so that, when a small business sells and ships a product online, it’s deducted from the entire system; the inventory level will be adjusted and sent out to all the connected channels.
Of course, as you perform your regular inventory, make sure the numbers correspond with what you have online. But with a website suited to small business SEO and conversions, both this task and organization can happen almost instantaneously!
