How To Get Your Inventory Ready For the Holidays
The last thing you want when you’re already busy during the holidays is for someone to order something that you don’t actually have in stock. At best, you’ve got to take the time to email them to apologize, then cancel their order. At worst, you might not realize you don’t have enough on hand to fill their order, and waste time searching for the item. Then, your customer gets annoyed because their order hasn’t shipped, and they don’t know why. Eventually you’ll have to issue a refund, and you’ve got one angry customer who’d like nothing better than to spread the word about how you ruined their holidays!
Deep breath. That’s the worst case scenario. And it’s not going to happen! Why? Because you’re going to take our advice and take stock of your inventory before the holiday season kicks into full swing. And, why not? It’s as simple as asking yourself the following 4 questions.
What do you have?
In answering this simple question, you set the stage for understanding where you’re at with inventory going into this busy time of year. However you have to do it, just get it done.
How many do you have of each?
If you sell different colors, sizes, styles etc., remember that you set your stock level for each variant you have so you need to know how many of each is in your warehouse/spare room.
Armed with this information, you can now make sure all your stock levels in your Storenvy store match up with what you actually have to sell.
Do you have any new or seasonal products?
If you’ve made, or ordered in, new products for the holidays now’s the time to make sure you get those listed in your store as well. No one can buy something that isn’t in your store and it’s no use finally getting around to listing them in December! Now is also the time to reactivate any seasonal products so your customers can start browsing them before they start making their decisions on what to buy.
Are you selling across multiple platforms?
Although it’d be easier to sell your goods just through Storenvy (and we’d, *ahem*, fully support that) because all sales through your shop are automatically deducted from your listings, we realize most merchants sell through a few different platforms. This can get super challenging. We recommend calling in reinforcements in the form of third party applications like Stitchlabs or Shopseen. By integrating these into your selling strategy, you’ll seamlessly keep track of all of your inventory, no matter where you sell it.
While all this may seem like a large undertaking that you don’t have time for right now, the peace of mind and time you’ll save during the busiest time of year will absolutely be worth it.
