Solving e Commerce Inventory Control

Ecommerce presents significant opportunities. Ecommerce inventory control raises challenges, particularly in cases where businesses grow quickly in stock volume and turnover. Decisions regarding web platforms and inventory management are complex.

If you are a start up, funding is always a challenge, so a basic website with manual ordering and stock control may be your best choice. But what happens once your ecommerce business starts to grow? Once orders are doubling month on month or year on year, the manual approach may not be sufficient. You may want to consider more sophisticated software infrastructure. Telltale signs that your ecommerce inventory control needs an overhaul include:

• Lost or delayed orders
• Running out of stock
• Delays or problems with supplier chain
• Stressed staff trying to manage too much information
• Dissatisfied customers

The benefits of third party fulfilment

Depending on the type of products you are shipping, a third party fulfilment provider like www.coghlan.com.au can help solve your problems. Your containers are shipped directly to them and orders from your site go directly to them. Third party fulfilment providers can really ease the strain of ecommerce inventory control as they manage every aspect of ordering:

• pick, pack and dispatch
• same day delivery (or other delivery guarantees)
• full tracking and returns systems

Third party fulfilment can be very cost effective and is worth researching if you are looking to streamline stock control processes.

Integrating ecommerce inventory control

This is a huge challenge for many businesses – for example, what if you are an established business with a legacy accounting system? Perhaps your web developer sold you on Magento, with its inventory management module, but now you are finding you can’t link the data with your accounts.

These issues are often not easily solved without significant investment. One option is to coordinate your ecommerce overhaul with other concurrent systems upgrades. This can reduce the overall cost.

For example, if you have Microsoft Navision, you can map any field from your inventory system or account to the web via secure access – making it easy for your customers to order online.

There are a number of systems with this kind of ecommerce inventory control functionality. Investing in the right one can save you an enormous amount of money and time in the long run.

Whether you run a business with greater than $3 million turnover and large numbers of individual stock items, or a smaller company with specific inventory requirements – it is important to employ the system that will give you the best ROI.

iQuantum specialises in solving these types of problems within a digital marketing context. Please get in touch to talk through what is available for your business.