Ecommerce inventory solutions for your business – they play a key role in everything your do in your ecommerce business. Building an effective ecommerce inventory process is one of the most important yet challenging aspects of running a successful business. A great place to start is to develop a solid foundation that streamlines the process, as well as getting familiar with industry best practices. Here at Thill Inc., we have well over 100+ resources to help you find solutions in all things related to fulfillment, shipping, and inventory.
To build a sustainable, profitable, scalable ecommerce business, you need to fully understand how to manage inventory. No matter what stage you’re in on your journey, inventory management is always a big key to success. Poor inventory management can be a complex challenge to overcome for any ecommerce entrepreneur no matter your expertise, the size of your business, the types of products you sell, or the audience you serve.
Partnering with a 3PL can simplify the inventory management process with top-of-class inventory management software that integrates in minutes with your online store. It’s a powerful ecommerce inventory solution for your business, this is because our powerful ecommerce technology suite delivers real-time analytics and data you can rely on.
When you need to make fast business decisions, unless you want to guess (and I’d imagine you wouldn’t), you have to rely on your real-time data. For those of you that are selling thousands of products a day, you’re making vital business decisions regularly. Your data needs to be reliable and accurate, who are you going to trust to deliver that data?
While we’ve been around for 50+ years, we’ve spent the past few decades engineering our state-of-the-art software, helping our clients get real-time data 24/7 – 365 days a year.
Inventory is often your biggest expense, you need to have the ability to track it flawlessly. To streamline your inventory, you need a fulfillment and warehouse solution you can trust.
That’s where Thill Inc. can help.
Inventory Management Terms You Need To Know
There’s several inventory management terms you must be familiar with – we’ll cover the most important terms now.
- Inventory: it refers to tangible items, products, or goods that you plan on selling to customers
- SKUs: stock keeping unit (SKU) is an identification code that you use to classify and organize products
- Supply Chain: this is the processes and systems involved in producing, managing, and distributing product
- Units of Measure: whatever you use to measure your stock (items, pieces, bundles, kilograms, ounces, etc)
- Dead Stock: this would be your inventory that you have in stock but can’t necessarily sell anymore
- Buffer Stock: the amount of extra stock on hand that’s used to limit risk if supply and demand are uncertain
- Minimum Viable Stock: this refers to the minimum amount of product you need to have on hand in order to keep up with consumer demand and fulfill orders without delay
- Variants: variations of the same product, such as a different color
- Lead Time: this refers to the time delay between when inventory is ordered from a supplier and when it arrives
- Re-order Point (ROP): the pre-determined level inventory must drop to before ordering additional inventory
- First in First Out (FIFO): Shopify gives a definition of FIFO as follows, “an accounting method assumes that sellable assets, such as inventory, raw materials, or components acquired first were sold first. That is, the oldest merchandise is sold first, with its associated costs being used to determine profitability”
- Just-in-Time (JIT): this is a fulfillment method where inventory orders are made just in time to keep up with consumer demand. This method allows you to avoid tying cash up in unsold inventory but it also creates a potential risk of not being able to fulfill a sudden surge of orders
- ABC Analysis: this is a method for prioritizing the existing inventory you have – using 3 unique categories: (A) high-value products with a low frequency of sales; (B) moderate value products with a moderate frequency of sales; (C) low-value products with a high frequency of sales.
- Dropshipping: this fulfillment strategy is where you fulfill orders but inventory is shipped from a 3rd party
- Centralized Inventory Control: software that allows you to easily manage, track, and control inventory across multiple ecommerce websites like Amazon, eBay, and Etsy
- Inventory Management:the process of managing inventory
- Inventory Management Software: tools that help you track inventory, streamline processes, automate tedious tasks, and leverage data and other insights to boost success
- Cost of Goods Sold (COGS): Intuit describes COGS as “an accounting item reported on the income statement that details the total costs of the products or merchandise sold by a business and considered an expense during a reporting period”
- Inventory Forecasting: making informed decisions about ordering and reordering products based on historical data, trends, and seasonality in your business
- Inventory Auditing: the act of manually counting or checking inventory to ensure that it matches the numbers that exist within your tracking and automation systems
- Carrying Cost/Holding Cost: the cost of holding your inventory in a year versus the value of the inventory itself
Many of these are going to be familiar to you, others may not. Due to this, understanding them and the concepts with each are going to help you become more informed and strategic when it comes to managing and optimizing inventory management processes and other tasks in your business.
Ecommerce Inventory Management With Thill Inc.
Thill combines fulfillment services and market leading technology with ecommerce inventory management software built in. This allows business owners, managers, and merchants the ability to easily manage inventory, even across multiple stores and fulfillment centers, while delivering fast and affordable shipping for their customers.
Inventory Distribution
Using more than one warehouse to store inventory, also known as distributed inventory, is a great way to deliver fast and affordable shipping to your customers. Thill owns several fulfillment centers within the continental US to deliver fast shipping nationwide.
Inventory Tracking
With Thill’s inventory tracking software in place, your orders and inventory are synced in real-time. Having the technology to set up real-time inventory counts in our fulfillment centers allows you to view the status of inventory you send to us, the quantity on hand at our fulfillment center(s), and many metrics on your inventory’s performance.
Inventory Reorder Points
Thill’s inventory management software and analytics dashboard make it easy to calculate and automate reorder points. This helps ensure you’ll always have just enough inventory on hand without falling behind on your next batch. Being able to calculate reorder points also leads to better, more accurate forecasting by having timely and accurate data to pull from and understand your optimal reorder quantity.
Ecommerce Inventory Solutions: How Thill Inc. Works
Finding the right ecommerce inventory solutions is essential to the growth of your business. When you choose Thill as your 3PL partner, you’re given the support, resources, facilities, and tools you need to simplify the inventory management and ecommerce fulfillment process. Once you connect your store to our technology, we’ll get you set up to send us your inventory and ecommerce orders will automatically be fulfilled after your customers make a purchase.
If you’re ready to take your fulfillment to the next level so your company can thrive, be sure to reach out today! You can always reach us at (920) 967-9201 or you can use our contact form. Either way, we look forward to helping you in every area of your fulfillment and logistics.
