Skip to content

If you’ve worked in product storage, e-commerce, or direct retail, you know one thing to be true: some products are a little more successful than others.

 

Not to be unfair to everything else in your inventory, but it’s a fact of life that not all items will move at the same rates. Despite this fact, most inventory planning strategies tend to suggest on treating every product equally in regards to restocking, organizing, and demand, but in many cases this simply isn’t practical.

 

Higher-volume, faster-moving products need to be treated with a bit more care and specificity than other, more ‘average’ items, and while an overall inventory management plan is critical to the success of your business, focusing on specific items is a good way to maximize sales and help get your most popular items into the hands of consumers who want them that much faster. Here’s a few tips to help you identify and maximize your best selling inventory items:

 

Review sales figures more frequently. If it looks like an item has started to move more quickly than in the past, or if you know you have a hot seller on your hands, you’ll want to start by taking a look at sales figures and reports more often than you have before. Move to a monthly (or even bi-weekly) reporting scheme and carefully track any of the items you have that have seen an upswing in sales, or at least any items you’re expecting to see sell more. This will give you a better idea of exactly how fast something is moving, and what levels you need to keep your inventory at.

 

Calculate safe inventory levels for faster-selling items. Once you’ve gotten a better handle on product movement and average sales figures, you can begin to estimate a safe and appropriate level for your more popular items. Other factors should be considered too, such as lead times, scheduling, distribution times, and even manufacturing if your facility is involved in producing the goods in question. Dictate a safe inventory level and make sure to schedule your re-orders accordingly.

 

Provide extra storage and organization for frequently-needed products. If your products are moving that quickly, you might want to change where they’re stored and how they’re organized. Get some extra wire shelving, steel shelving, or even pallet racks and devote a specific area to best-selling products so your workers can get to them more quickly, and so the constant rush to get to these items doesn’t interfere with other daily operations through the warehouse. If need be, you may want to consider re-balancing staffing levels to attend to the increased demand of these items as well.

 

Don’t neglect your other items. Of course, even after making these steps to target your best-selling goods, you don’t want to ignore the other items and warehouse processes you need to attend to. Spread your attention to all areas of the warehouse, and all the products you stock, to make sure nothing is ignored or misused and to keep operations flowing as smoothly as possible. A few high-volume items won’t do you any good if your operations aren’t being managed carefully, and this can cause way bigger problems down the line if you’re not careful.

Comments are closed.

Back to top