Time is money. Most of us know that simply because we exchange our time for money doing what we call our “jobs”. However, when you are in business for yourself, your time really is a lot of money. After all, if you are handling every facet of the work, time spent doing menial tasks could be costing you opportunities for growing the business.
Nowhere is this more common than for those doing multichannel retail. Those selling on Amazon, eBay, Sears, newegg, and their own eCommerce websites (among many other channels) know that there are a lot of small tasks that are essential to the business, but they can add up to a huge amount of time. This time can cost you the chance to actively and even aggressively grow your business.
This is a major reason to investigate any and all options for eBay inventory management tools. It won’t matter if your business is run on the premises and you yourself manually pick and pack orders or if you have a warehouse operation, the use of some sort of eBay inventory management ensures a few key things:
- You don’t hold too much inventory on hand and commit financial resources to items gathering dust and waiting to be sold;
- You don’t over sell because you did not have enough on hand, and you now are at risk for a canceled order or negative feedback because of delays;
- You can immediately register the impact of changes to the product descriptions (and can do so across all of the sales channels). This is significant to sellers looking to boost their SEO and generate traffic to the eCommerce website because it proves that their keywords are working; and
- You never have to manually adjust the inventory at other channels.
Interestingly enough, it is that last item that is of the most significance. Why? Because it is one of those mandatory and essential tasks that will tend to gobble up so much time and even financial resources. After all, if you are not seated at your computer, manually adjusting inventory across channels, someone else has to do it and it is likely that they are going to be paid to do so.
So, the use of eBay inventory management makes old-fashioned, good sense. However, you can get a lot more out of certain types of eBay inventory management tools than just eBay specific outcomes.
Choosing Integrated eBay Inventory Management
If the tool that you use for eBay inventory management is part of a broader system you will find that your workflow is far more efficient, and virtually error free.
As the simplest possible example, just consider the case of the seller who did all of their inventory management manually. They sold ten of one item on eBay, and had four left on hand. This was something that automatically adjusted within the eBay system, but they had to go to Amazon to enter in the proper number on hand. They were in a bit of a hurry and accidentally hit the “4” key twice, and then updated their account. They did not see this error, and when another order for ten came in that same day they were surprised.
The order had already processed, and so the seller had to contact the buyer and let them know that the items were on backorder. This, sadly, cost them the sale. It could have been worse and resulted in negative feedback.
Avoid all glitches of this kind with a more automated approach that updates across all channels without any risks for error.
Summary
eBay inventory management is challenging when done manually. You can erase the risks for errors and lost sales by turning to a more automatic solution.
Source
Fishbowl. Smart eBay Sellers Use Inventory Management Software. Fishbowl. 2014. https://www.fishbowlinventory.com/articles/inventory-management-software/smart-ebay-sellers-use-inventory-management-software/