BigCommerce Inventory Management: A Step-by-step Guide
By Sam Nguyen
If you monitor your own stock or collaborate with an independent reseller, inventory is a significant financial asset, both in terms of the purchase price and storage cost.
The following article will give you a step-by-step guide on how to keep track of your products On BigCommerce. We’ll explain BigCommerce features, and introduce tools to provide helpful advice from industry experts to distinguish generic hurdles.
What is BigCommerce inventory management?
BigCommerce inventory management involves ordering, storing, and leveraging a company’s inventory. This includes managing everything from raw materials and components to finished products, handling the storage and flow of goods.
Why is BigCommerce inventory management critical?
Increase accuracy for tracking your inventory
Tracking customer shopping habits has become increasingly challenging, with over 40% of consumers purchasing through multiple channels. This complexity also affects product tracking across these platforms, potentially leading to system misalignments and resulting in about 15% of inventory inaccuracies in multichannel eCommerce.
As a result, store owners should use control effective inventory management. The control provides critical insights, offering a clear view of sales trends and customer preferences. By analyzing sales data and customer behaviors, businesses can make informed decisions, identifying top-performing and underperforming products.
Work smarter, not harder
Manual inventory tracking, looking for “missing” items, updating stock levels on ecommerce platforms by hand, and addressing customer issues related to inventory errors significantly drain employee time. Optimizing inventory management in BigCommerce can enhance staff efficiency. Integrating third-party apps and warehouse management systems can boost automation, minizing the necessity for manual adjustments and decreasing the likelihood of human errors.
How to set up BigCommerce Inventory Management: A Step-by-Step Guide
In this section, we will focus on how to set up inventory tracking for store owners manage and sell online.
Step 1: Create New Products for Inventory Tracking
- In the left of the dashboard, select “Products” to access the inventory screen. Simply go ahead and press “Add.”
- You start adding all product information, including Product name, SKU, Product type — physical or digital, Default price — excluding tax, Brand, and Weight — for shipping purposes , or Categories for selling products.
Step 2: Update Product Information
Once you have finished, scroll down through different sections or use the “Product Information” menu on the left to skip.
- Product description
- Images & Videos: Add product images or videos to engage customers by pressing “Add from URL” or “Upload Images.”
- Product Identifiers: Fill in the table information
- Pricing: Add pricing information
- Press “Save” to complete product information
Step 3: Product Inventory management
- Moving on to the "Inventory" section, you have the choice to track inventory at the product or variant level. To track at the variant level, you'll need to set up your variants. Here, you can also specify your current stock and low stock levels, which are your reorder points.
- For products with different variants, you'll find a section "Variations." Click on "Add Variant" to start configuring your variations. You can name the variation (e.g., color) and specify its values (e.g., red, green, blue). The "Type" option determines how these variations will be displayed on your website.
- “Modifier” section allows you to offer customizable options to your customers, like adding custom text to a product.
Several key factors of a successful inventory management strategy
A successful inventory management strategy involves several key factors:
- Analyze Influencing Factors: Aim to minimize inventory storage while ensuring sufficient stock to meet demand. Excess inventory ties up capital, whereas insufficient stock can lead to lost sales and poor customer experiences.
- Predictability and Seasonality: Understand the seasonal demand for your products. For instance, stock up on swimsuits before summer and coats before winter, rather than during off-peak seasons, to avoid unnecessary storage costs.
- Monitor Competition: Keep an eye on competitors' strategies, including pricing and product launches, to stay competitive in the market.
- Stay Ahead of Trends: Product demand can decline rapidly if items become unfashionable. Regular industry and consumer research can help you know changes in market preferences.
- Understand Personal Preferences: Know your target audience and their preferences to stock accordingly. For example, if a particular color of a T-shirt is more popular, maintain a higher stock of that variant.
- Leverage Advertising: Advertising can significantly impact demand. Ensure your ads are well-targeted and consider having extra stock for promoted items.
- Source Quality Products: Maintain a consistent stock of best-sellers and separate them from less popular items for efficient warehouse management.
- Forecasting Sales: Use tools like Google Trends and historical sales data to forecast demand and adjust inventory levels accordingly.
- Create a Schedule: Develop a schedule based on research and forecasts to manage stock levels effectively. Adjust this schedule as needed to align with actual business activities.
- Consider Outliers: Keep stock for off-season buyers or those looking for discounts, balancing between overstocking and meeting unexpected demand.
- Warehouse Management: The size and location of your storage facilities significantly affect inventory management. Optimize space utilization and consider location advantages for cost reduction and market positioning.
- Use Third-Party Logistics (3PLs): For businesses unable to manage warehousing in-house, 3PLs offer a scalable solution that can save time and resources.
- Streamline Order Processing: Enhancing the order fulfillment process improves customer satisfaction. Consider technology solutions to streamline these operations.
Common mistakes in Inventory Management and how to avoid them
Here are several errors for BigCommerce store owners to deal with inventory management:
1. Overstocking
Overloading, unlike overselling, involves having too much inventory instead of too little. This excess stock can lead to several problems:
- It consumes valuable storage space.
- The demand for the product may decrease before you can sell all the inventory.
- It locks up resources that could be beneficial elsewhere in the company.
2. Overselling
One common issue for online retailers is selling items they don't actually have in stock. This happens when inventory levels are inaccurately recorded, making products seem available when they're actually sold out. Naturally, this leads to a poor experience for the customer. At this point, they're likely to cancel their order and shop elsewhere. Even worse, they might leave a negative review or publicly criticize the retailer or their business on social media.
3. Unreasonable Prices
For many companies, pricing is a tricky matter. You can check your pricing policies regularly to ensure that your rates are fair in your industry.
Out-of-date pricing will cause your goods to remain on the shelves for weeks or months at a time, wasting shelf space and exhausting your operating resources.
4. Poor warehouse management system
Warehouse managers are constantly seeking more efficient ways to organize their operations. Simply rearranging items for easier access can lead to significant cost savings. Often, employees spend too much time looking for products within the warehouse, and since time equals money, this is inefficient.
5. Ineffective inventory check
Many businesses close for a day to conduct inventory checks, leading to lost revenue. This challenge is even greater for large manufacturers with extensive catalogs, which may face weeks of profit loss. To avoid shutting down operations and missing out on sales, businesses should conduct more frequent inventory assessments.
6. Human error
One of the most common misjudgments by vendors is relying on empirical information when making decisions.
They might remember something as trendy based on personal experience, but they do not analyze actual sales/return data to provide a more holistic or reliable view.
Three BigCommerce Tools for inventory management
Brightpearl
- Rating: 4.0/5
- Total reviews: 7
Brightpearl offers a Retail Operating System (ROS) designed for retailers and wholesalers, aiming to automate back-office operations to free up resources for business growth. Its ROS encompasses financial, inventory, and sales order management, along with purchasing, supplier management, CRM, fulfillment, and logistics.
Highlight features
- Flexible Order Routing and Fulfillment
- Multi-Location Inventory Management
- Automated Accounting
- Multi-Channel Management
Pricing: Contact for Pricing
Stock Sync
- Rating: 5.0/5
- Total reviews: 30 reviews
Stock Sync is an essential app for inventory management because it simplifies managing products and updates inventory seamlessly, even for items not added through the app. It allows you to adjust product pricing with its pricing rule feature and gives you the flexibility to include or exclude products from the feed.
Highlight features:
- Supports all kind of file format
- Automatic scheduling
- Markup product(s) price
- Reduce overselling
Pricing:
- Free Trial: 14 days
- Upfront Fee: $0
- Recurring Fee: $5/mo.
See more: Top 20 BigCommerce Website Examples
3. AVADA
AVADA is an eCommerce-specific email and SMS marketing automation tool designed to help small businesses grow without adding to their workload. One-click BigCommerce shop integration, pre-built workflows, and intuitive drag-and-drop editing make it simple to get up and running without getting overwhelmed by the minutiae.
Over 50,000 eCommerce companies use AVADA to expand their businesses automatically by attracting consumers with easy-to-create, highly-relevant emails and texts.
Final Thoughts
For “New Age” online distribution companies like yours, BigCommerce offers plenty of choices on tracking systems and applications. Your company needs solid intelligence and data regarding buying and revenue records to maximize inventory distribution. You should schedule and conduct product movements through several locations in this manner, ensuring that you get the best out of your stocks
