Before you can ship products to customers, you first must have products to ship! Successful inventory management can make the difference between profitability and failure. Some sellers generate their own inventory through manufacturing or creating their products in-house. Many sellers receive their inventory stocks primarily from other sources, such as directly from another producer, or through an intermediary seller.

No matter where your inventory originates, in order to be a successful seller, you will have to be able to consistently and reliably track the location and quantity of your stock at all times. Reducing delivery time and eliminating periods of stockout are two of the most significant ways to maintain customer satisfaction, but these goals cannot be consistently achieved without good inventory management. There is nothing worse than having to tell a customer, after a purchase, that you in fact will not be shipping the order, because you are actually out of stock.

Good inventory management yields more benefits than simply knowing your stock levels, it also permits you to use Market to accurately run reports to identify important trends, such as:

• Accuracy of forecast demand (compares on-hand quantity to the forecasted demand)
• Fill rate (measures how many items were shipped compared to ordered)
• Lost sales ratio (number of days a product is out of stock compared to projected sales over that time)
• Inventory shrinkage (inventory that you cannot find or cannot sell due to damage)
• Backorder rate (rate of unfulfilled orders due to items on backorder)

One of the most basic benefits of good inventory management is that it reduces anxiety for you, the seller. Don’t spend time worrying or wondering about your inventory; take the time to rigorously manage your inventory so you can assuage those creeping fears with a simply click of a mouse, to review your current inventory status.

It is important to count and inspect your inventory when you receive it, and prior to logging it into your Market inventory.  Items may have sustained damage before they arrived at your facility. Selling a damaged product is worse than having made no sale at all, because of the resources that will be expended in addressing the inevitable customer complaint. Don’t make your customer conduct your inventory inspection for you.

The satisfactory items then need to be categorized, logged in Market, and stored. Items are typically logged using a SKU code (stock-keeping unit). SKUs can be very powerful tools in managing inventory, because they reflect important information about the product. For example, most SKUs will indicate information like the product category, supplier, color, size, brand, sequence identifier, or other information relevant to your store. You may want to invest in a label maker, in order to quickly print an affix your SKU (with a barcode) to the product. Then you can use the Market app on your phone to quickly scan the code and automatically log the item in your Market inventory.

After logging items into Market, place your items into physical inventory storage. This may simply be your garage or an area of your home, or it could be at another physical location. This step is critical; efficient organization of your warehouse can serve to really boost your margins. Don’t permit yourself to “lose” an item in inventory. There is nothing more frustrating than receiving an order for an item you know you have in stock, but you are unable to locate it. All the time you spend searching is potential lost revenue.