Navigate inventory management with our expert guide, empowering you to minimize costs, reduce stockouts, and maximize customer satisfaction.
This guide is brought to you by Sellercloud, the industry leader in inventory management and omnichannel e-commerce.
Inventory management is more than just putting products on shelves! Effective—and likewise, poor—inventory management impacts all aspects of your business.
Mastering inventory management can have huge implications for your business and help you take it to the next level—not just survive but thrive.
Why Learn About Inventory Management?
There are many benefits to completing Sellercloud’s inventory management guide, no matter what part of the inventory management system you belong to.
Understanding how inventory management works will help streamline processes, reduce waste and costs, increase productivity, and balance your business’s inventory levels.
In the end, it’s all about improving the operational efficiency of your inventory, which has a knock-on effect on other aspects of e-commerce.
For example, without inventory management ensuring that products are available when customers need them can be difficult and can impact customer satisfaction further down the line.
This is because professionals trained in inventory management can better fulfill customer orders, minimize stockouts, and provide faster order fulfillment, increasing customer satisfaction and loyalty.
Proper inventory management also helps professionals identify and address issues such as overstocking, stockouts, and excess inventory making work easier.
Optimizing inventory levels and implementing effective inventory control strategies can minimize holding costs, reduce waste, and enhance cost savings—all important for the success of thriving e-commerce businesses.
Meanwhile, expertise in inventory management equips decision-makers with valuable data and insights.
Enabling them to make informed decisions regarding purchasing, pricing, production planning, and supply chain optimization.
This strategic decision-making helps businesses stay competitive and adapt to changing market demands.
On top of that, inventory management plays a crucial role in supply chain operations. Professionals who learn about inventory management gain the knowledge and skills to:
- Optimize inventory-related processes.
- Collaborate with suppliers.
- Manage lead times.
- Reduce supply chain disruptions.
Finally, having expertise in inventory management can open up career advancement opportunities.
It demonstrates their ability to drive efficiency, cost savings, and customer satisfaction within their organizations.
This expertise can make them valuable assets for employers seeking to optimize their inventory management practices.
Sound overwhelming? Don’t worry about it. We’ll guide you through it all step by step.
Who Is This Guide For?
This guide is ideal for beginners starting in inventory management, regardless of their industry, including small business owners, operations managers, e-commerce sellers and specialists, inventory control personnel and supply chain staff, and everyone in between.
While much of the guide is orientated toward US sellers, this guide can be a helpful resource for anyone working in inventory management.
What Will I Learn in This Inventory Management Guide?
We’ll start small and work toward more extensive and advanced topics. Here are some of the things you will learn in this guide:
- How inventory management works, the most used terms, and what role inventory management plays in e-commerce.
- How to arrange your storage space and set up inventory management workflow procedures.
- The top inventory management challenges, best practices, and the cost involved.
- How to anticipate demand and set up a contingency plan.
- How you can automate and improve the inventory management process.
How Long Is This Inventory Management Guide?
This guide is divided into 19 chapters (including a bonus section at the end). If you’re sitting in front of the screen with a cup of coffee, you might want to start brewing a second.
Here’s the breakdown of our inventory management guide:
- Chapter 1. What Is Inventory Management? This is where beginners should start. We start from the very beginning of inventory management.
- Chapter 2. What Are the Basic Concepts of Inventory Management? We cover the basics of inventory management—including its relationship to the supply chain.
- Chapter 3. What Are Inventory Management Techniques? Here we’ll start to dig into the different techniques used for inventory management.
- Chapter 4. What Is an Inventory Control System? Getting a little more advanced, we’ll explain all there is to know about perpetual and periodic inventory control systems.
- Chapter 5. What Are Inventory Management Systems? We explain how barcodes and other management systems work.
- Chapter 6. What Is Inventory Management Software? In Chapter 6, we’ll reveal all there is to know about inventory management software, such as OMS, and cloud software.
- Chapter 7. What Is Inventory Management Tracking? Everything you need to know about inventory tracking.
- Chapter 8. What Is Multichannel Inventory Management? Managing inventory when selling products through multiple channels.
- Chapter 9. What Are Inventory Management KPIs and Metrics? The many ways you can measure your inventory management operations.
- Chapter 10. How Do You Handle Returned Inventory? Every angle you need to consider for your returns operations.
- Chapter 11. What Are Common Challenges of Inventory Management? Inventory management can be tricky—here are the challenges you’ll likely face.
- Chapter 12. What Costs Are Associated with Inventory Management? Don’t get caught off guard when it comes to the costs of inventory management!
- Chapter 13. What Are the Best Practices of Inventory Management? These valuable tips will help you avoid many of the traps of inventory management.
- Chapter 14. What Is the Importance of Forecasting in Inventory Management? How you can get ahead of product demand in inventory management.
- Chapter 15. What Is Contingency Planning in Inventory Management? How to keep inventory management operations running if catastrophe hits.
- Chapter 16. How to Automate Inventory Management? The benefits of automating areas of inventory management.
- Chapter 17. How to Improve Inventory Management? Continuous improvement is vital to surviving in inventory management, and there are many areas to optimize.
- Chapter 18. Conclusion – Everything You Need To Know About Inventory Management. We conclude all the most essential points from our guide.
- Chapter 19. Bonus – Frequently Asked Questions About Inventory Management. In the final Chapter of our guide, we include all the questions we couldn’t fit in.
Bookmark this page and return whenever you need a refresh or want to advance to the next level. Let’s get started with Chapter 1!