Viare sales director Patrick Gaskin discusses the challenges of overselling and underselling.
Intelligent Order Management is crucial for successful online retail operations, specifically in managing inventory accurately and efficiently.
Accurate inventory management is crucial for any eCommerce business looking to grow and succeed. Without a precise view of your inventory, you will face numerous challenges that can negatively impact your business.
Overselling occurs when inventory is not accurate and products are sold that are unavailable to ship. Manual inventory management, delayed updates, and ineffective reporting on cancelled orders all contribute to overselling. This then negatively affects revenue, customer satisfaction, and brand reputation.
On the other hand, underselling, having more stock available than listed online, is largely caused by excessive safety stock levels. While it may protect against cancelled orders, it can still result in poor customer experience, lower sales, and wasted investment in marketing.
Inventory errors significantly impact operations. Poor workflow and cumbersome processes lead to expensive manual interventions, decreased staff morale, and further order cancellations. Inaccurate picking and shipping errors compound inventory issues and contribute to over and under-selling.
Inaccurate inventory can lead to pickers avoiding orders with more items because they know the chances of an inventory issue occurring is greater. Similarly, not using near real-time inventory in decision-making can lead to less optimal fulfilment outcomes. Here are two simple everyday examples:
- Orders are being unnecessarily split as items you thought were available are not and those need to be sent to another location.
- Click & Collect orders are not being fulfilled from the collection store as the inventory files are not up to date.
To minimize these issues, workflows should be optimized to use real-time inventory data, and processes and tools should be in place to minimize errors during picking and shipping. It is essential to have a modern order management system (OMS) that provides near real-time inventory updates to online channels.
A reliable OMS should accurately depict the "Available to Promise" inventory and integrate it with various systems for a single view of inventory. It should also manage in-progress orders and support the quarantine of inventory for investigation. Comprehensive reporting of inventory and cancelled orders helps monitor and address inaccuracies, leading to improved accuracy and profitability.
Viare is an intelligent order management solution that offers near real-time availability updates and optimized workflows for accurate inventory management. It scales to manage diverse inventory needs and multiple inventory feeds, ensuring a complete and accurate view of stock levels. With Viare, businesses can confidently scale their operations, improve sales, and enhance overall efficiency.
In conclusion, maintaining near real-time accuracy and availability in online sales channels is crucial to avoid inventory issues, delivering excellent customer experience, and business success. Viare offers an intelligent order management solution to address these challenges and empower businesses to optimize their inventory management.
To help you gain a better understanding of inventory management, we've developed this guide. In it, you'll discover:
● The key reasons for overselling
● Why overselling is bad for your business
● Underselling - what it is and how it impacts your business
● How inventory errors impact fulfilment operations
● Picking and shipping errors
● How to minimise inventory issues
● The benefits of implementing a modern OMS
We also provide a brief overview of our OMS solution and its inventory management abilities. Click here to download.
About Viare
Viare is an intelligent order management system designed to address inventory challenges and optimize inventory management. Viare, an eStar company, has developed its technology over twenty years and helps facilitate more than $1.5B in annual sales online.
Viare scales to manage a high volume of orders across multiple Sellers and inventory locations and allows retailers to make all store stock available for sale enabling store-based fulfilment to be a retailer’s competitive advantage. Its intelligent order management has been recognised by Gartner as one of the leading distributed order management systems in the world.
Contact Viare today to discuss how their system can support your success in online retail operations www.viare.io