This is a tradition well known among merchants; whenever the big shopping season arrives every year, they tend to pile up inventories to take good advantage of the season. But as soon as the season fades away, these retailers are worried about the unsold stock in there warehouses, which lies idly incurring additional costs and losing its value at a speed.
However there are some of the best practices that these merchants can use to do away with the unsold merchandise.
Analyze the Big Picture
The stock in your storehouse should turn over within 90 days, but in case it does not…it implies that you need to make some extra efforts to sell it. Unsold inventory is one of the biggest challenges that online retailers face nowadays. The unsold goods that remain on the shelves for a long time lose value and increase maintenance costs. This also ties up merchants’ cash, which could be used in procuring latest and more profitable merchandise.
Bundle Your Best Sellers
What merchants can do, so as to get rid of the unsold stock, is that they can bundle this idle stock with some of their best selling items, and the offer it at a reasonable price. For instance merchants can bundle their not too popular hair removing gel with their fast selling epilator machines. This increases products’ turnover rate as customers perceive it to be a valuable deal.
Create Hot Deals
Some merchants might not settle on selling the products at a price lower than the original, but they don’t seem to understand that they are already in loss by incurring costs for keeping the unsold stock in their store, which also loses its value very fast.
Try slashing the slow selling item’s price if you want to get rid of it. It’s better to take the loss sooner than late. You can offer customers with discounts to grab their attention and interest in your slow wrangling merchandise. You are not obliged to offer the same percentage of price slash on all the items. You can come up with different discounts rates on different products. For example you can give your customers a 50% discount on hair removing gel, 30 percent on skin lightening lotion and 20% on scented candles etc.
On the other hand you can also plan your promotional deals on the basis of seasons, products or holiday to give your sales a little boost and do away with slow moving items in the ecommerce funnel.
Give Away In Charity
You can sell your slow selling items by offering a discount on them and in turn giving away a cut in charity. This really interests customers and you can touch the soft corners of their hearts by giving them the feeling that they are working for a social cause. This gives customers the satisfaction that they are able to help the destitute and thus they buy your products to make their contribution in the good deed.
Sell In Bulk
You can group together similar items in a lot or you can sell your inventory in bulk with a big discount. This will assist merchants to do away with the burden of creating numerous and incessant discount processes and at the same time ridding unsold merchandise.
Sell With Magento extensions/Add-ons
There are numerous Magento plugins that help online stores in bolstering up their sales and make good profits. Online retailers can integrate Who Viewed This Also Viewed with their point of sale (POS). The advantage of using Magento module is that you can understand the bigger picture of your merchandise. It enables you to analyze your inventory patterns like which items sell faster and which take longer than necessary time in turning over. In this way you are able to make certain which products you don’t want to have in your inventory and procure best-sellers timely, without running out of them. With this useful FMEs Magento Customers Also Viewed extension you can offer the right quantity of merchandise, without being rendered to either running short of it or being left with piles of unsold inventory in your storage. Integrating your POS with this Magento extension will fully automate your inventory process for you, which otherwise is a very difficult task to do manually.
It is imperative for merchants to analyze their inventory and find out the poor selling items, order the right quantity of the right products and get away with unsold inventory as soon as possible.