Managing Inventory for Your Online Store
by Veronica Stone on September 5th, 2007
What are the available options for managing your online inventory? It really depends on the size of your business and what method works best for you.
Essentially, there are three major ways that online businesses handle inventory.
Online management. This means every purchase that is made through your website is directly applied to your online product catalog through a web interface. You will have to go online to add more products, write new product descriptions, make changes to price, and upload images of the products. Everything will be handled online as it relates to your products and inventory.
This is a popular method because it offers a lot of flexibility in that you can add many features to your store quickly and easily. At the same time, this method does have a few disadvantages. It can take a lot of time to implement everything online, especially if you have a lot of products to deal with.
Offline management. Although you’re running on online business, you can choose to handle inventory mostly offline. This involves making price changes, adding new products, and managing inventory offline and offsite. You will probably use software in your home office or warehouse to carry out such tasks. You can purchase or have someone design custom software for offline product management, which works by loading information on a daily basis into your online store. This ensures that everything is kept up to date even though you’re handling inventory offline.
You may not be given as much versatility with this option, but it makes inventory management much easier if you have a large selection of products. You’ll be able to keep online product information up to date without as much trouble, although because you are running an online store, you will have to carry out some inventory tasks online.
Online/Offline Combination. This is a great option for most online business owners, simply because you get the best of both worlds. Online tools are available for adding, changing, and deleting products, but you are given the opportunity to do all the updates straight from your accounting package so that you can quickly and easily keep up with the competition.
The only disadvantage of this method is that you have to keep track of your product catalog in two locations. One copy of the information will be stored offline, while another copy will be located online. At certain times, the online information may differ slightly from what you have on record offline. If you decide to use both an online and offline system, be sure to implement some rules to keep track of everything.
This option is also more costly, because more functionality has to be built into the software to be able to handle the extra options. In the end, you should select the method that works best for your business. The main goal is to ensure the growth and financial success of your business, and lower your costs while giving you more free time to handle the daily tasks of your business.
