Is it ever too early to begin enjoying the holiday season? Depends on who you ask. For some, holiday music and decorations come out the day after Halloween, while others adamantly refuse to even consider doing anything holiday related until Thanksgiving leftovers have been eaten.
There is no right or wrong answer about when to begin the holiday season celebration, but as a product business, you don’t have the luxury of waiting. You should already be thinking about how to manage your inventory before the holidays arrive. Why? So that you can stay ahead of demand, avoid costly stockouts, and maximize your holiday revenue.
A successful (read: profitable) holiday season requires advanced, detailed planning, and because we live in a digital world, it requires finding, choosing, and implementing technology specially designed for your product business’s unique inventory needs. Inventory management software (IMS) is the way to go, and to prove it, we’ll explore five essential strategies using IMS like Cin7 that will help ensure your busy holiday seasons are always wonderful and bright.
Before the era of technology, forecasting future demand was largely a guessing game. Yes, you could use historical data, statistics, market trends, experts’ advice, and economic factors to determine how much product to produce and stock, but forecasting was often an onerous task that required manually analyzing limited amounts of data with subpar results.
Now, technology does it for you. Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) can aggregate and analyze large datasets, predicting demand and customer behavior without human intervention. This means the days of worrying over supplier lead times and frantically prepping for promotions because you’re not sure how much product is required are over.
With the power of technology, you’ll have the forecasting information you need when you need it, and under-or-over estimating the holiday surge will no longer be a factor in your success.
Similar to early forecasting, you’ll want to get a firm grip on your inventory now so that you can plan for your holiday bestsellers later.
For example, the right IMS will provide real-time inventory visibility. This includes the ability to do cycle counts (counting a certain amount of your inventory regularly without having to do the entire inventory count at once), which keeps you up to speed on what items you have in stock and helps you track any discrepancies in your inventory. And the IMS should also include inventory aging reports that inform you when an item has been sitting on your shelf for too long, indicating it should have a price reduction or be discarded altogether.
Inventory visibility ensures that you clear your slow movers, making room for your holiday bestsellers. You’ll have everything in order (and on order) that you need with accurate inventory numbers at your fingertips.
Streamlining your purchasing and reordering process before your peak season is a smart move for several reasons. One, streamlining any process makes that process simpler and more efficient, saving you time, money, and stress. Two, it guarantees that you’ll be able to easily and efficiently secure the right number of products before the holiday buyers come looking for them.
According to Cin7 research, 91% of shoppers feel frustrated when items they want are out of stock, and 70% of shoppers abandoned an entire purchase because an item they were looking for was out of stock. Avoiding such scenarios is clearly in your best interest.
Today’s shoppers understand they have many buying options. They can compare brands, prices, and quality simply by checking out what’s available on social media, e-commerce websites, and in brick-and-mortar stores. Invesp reports that multichannel shoppers spend three times more than single-channel shoppers.
With multichannel demand at an all-time high (especially during the holiday season), you’ll want IMS that can help you sync your inventory across all channels to prevent overselling. It will also aid you in easily reallocating inventory as needed during last-minute sales spikes, such as on Black Friday and Cyber Monday.
Keeping on top of your business’s performance and being able to react to changing conditions is almost impossible without technology like IMS. When there are shifts in inventory and you’re required to adjust promotions or there’s a need to reorder due to evolving demand, you must be able to do both quickly, efficiently, and effectively. That’s why you need an IMS that offers real-time dashboards, robust reporting capabilities, and sophisticated inventory turnover tracking, which work together to create a cohesive, smooth-running business—no matter what season it is.
From forecasting demand, optimizing your inventory, and streamlining your purchasing/reordering processes to preparing for multichannel demand and monitoring your performance, you have a lot on your pre-holiday season plate. Thankfully, you don’t have to go it alone.
Cin7’s IMS is here for you. In fact, it’s the gift that keeps on giving.
Cin7 can help you forecast demand using historical sales and real-time data across all sales channels with ForesightAI. Cin7’s ForesightAI predicts demand 24 months ahead, handing you the perfectly wrapped gift of a balanced inventory. Plus, as you’re making room for holiday products, you’ll have real-time inventory visibility with cycle counts capabilities and inventory aging reports.
Cin7 also gives you:
Altogether, these and other product business features make Cin7 a must-have solution all year round. Cin7 customer Suzanne Vaughan, Operations Manager, Dean Davidson, agrees.
“[With Cin7], the visibility is incredible,” she says. “The marketing team knows what we have, know what we can sell, and they know when we are understocked or overstocked. They can then make adjustments to their calendar to push what they need to push, to help clear out the inventory where it is.”
Cin7 can do the same for you. Contact us today for a free demo and learn how your holiday season—and every season—can be peaceful and prosperous.