As an Amazon seller, avoiding a stockout should be at the top of your priority list — especially as we head into the busy holiday season. Otherwise, you could lose sales, Buy Box ownership, and SEO rank when you need it most.
So if your inventory levels are dangerously low, do these five things to prevent running out of stock:
- Order More Inventory
First things first: place a new inventory order. If you already have one in the works, check on its status to find out when your inventory will be back on the shelves. Depending on how long your supplier typically takes to process your orders, you may need to pay a rush fee.
- Slow Your Sales
While you wait for your resupply order, you should do everything in your power to slow your own sales. While this may seem counterintuitive, it’s better than actually running out of stock. A simple way to slow your sales is to temporarily raise your prices so that demand decreases.
- Get Extra Inventory – aka Safety Stock
When your inventory levels improve, you may want to consider investing in safety stock, which is an extra supply of inventory to keep for emergencies. The amount of safety stock you order could be the same as a typical order or a certain percentage of a typical order — it really depends on your sales volume. Either way, you’ll use the safety stock to fulfill orders that come in after your regular supply hits zero and you’re waiting to replenish it.
- Talk to Your Suppliers
Communicating with your suppliers is so important for a sound inventory management strategy. To streamline your orders, make sure your suppliers are aware of your inventory needs and sales cycles so they can anticipate when and how much you’re likely to order at a given time. Likewise, you should be aware of their timelines and bandwidth — that way there won’t be any surprises when you need to place an order.
- Solve Your Cash Flow Issues
Increasing your cash flow will allow you to invest in growth opportunities and cover a variety of expenses, including last-minute inventory purchases. But selling on Amazon comes with its share of cash flow issues — after all, you don’t get paid on your sales in real time.
But what if you could? Payability, a financing company for marketplace sellers, gives you daily access to your income as you earn it. Here is how their three solutions work:
- Payability’s Instant Advance: They buy a discounted amount of your future receivables (for example, one month’s worth), giving you a large lump sum of cash that you can draw from daily to buy bulk inventory, invest in safety stock, or take advantage of other growth opportunities.
- Payability’s Instant Access: They pay you your Amazon income one business day after making a sale, so you can turn inventory more quickly.
- The Payability Seller Card: Available to Instant Access customers for even faster access to their income, including on weekends and holidays. It comes with 2% cash back and can be used wherever Visa is accepted.
Since 2016, more than 2,500 marketplace sellers have used Payability to keep their shelves stocked, turn inventory more quickly, and grow their businesses. One such seller increased her sales by 50% within a month of her first Instant Advance — hear her story here then visit http://go.payability.com/GETIDA to see how you can have the same success. You’ll get a $250 sign on bonus and discounted fees just for being part of the GETIDA community. For more on Payability and the impact they’ve had on ecommerce sellers, check them out on Trustpilot, Web Retailer and Glassdoor.
