4 Ways to Improve Inventory Management in your Retail Store

Whatever retail industry you operate in, you have undoubtedly had challenges with stocking, ordering, delivering and, most importantly, selling products to your customers. Trust me when I say, you’re not alone. iQmetrix works with industry-leading, vendor managed inventory partners to help alleviate some of the challenges in keeping retail stores stocked. Through analysis of market trends and conditions, these partners help retailers keep inventory balanced with optimal stock levels.

When a retailer focuses on improving and rationalizing their inventory management capabilities, it can mean a ripple effect of benefits for their entire business. 

But how do retailers get over their inventory obstacles? Well lucky for you, we wrote a guide on 5 strategies for approaching inventory management. 

1) Leverage Inventory Cost Control Opportunities

Understanding your inventory needs and ordering appropriately can be a huge win for controlling costs. Having visibility into what you have and what you need is vital to the success of the inventory manager. This allows them the opportunity to lower the per-item charges with bulk purchases and mitigate expansion costs by leveraging buying power with vendors.

2) Automating Inventory Management and Ordering

Retailers need to consider deploying the appropriate retail software, like those with vendor managed inventory (VMI) functionalities. These tools can integrate with and pull the necessary data from the most current internal retail management systems. With a fully VMI-integrated tool like iQmetrix’s retail management solution, RQ, businesses have an eagle-eye view of inventory data. It makes it easy to forecast stock requirements and automatically order popular items that keep customers coming back.

3) Go Beyond the Physical Stock 

We know it’s not possible to stock every item; however, there are ways to ensure the customer can always leave with the product they want. Incorporating a fulfillment solution, like iQmetrix’s Dropship, into an inventory management process allows retailers to offer an expanded array of products and accessories, without taking up valuable shelf space. 

4) Bringing Data-Driven Logic to Ordering

Speaking of product visibility mentioned above, bringing data-driven logic to ordering can give retailers more opportunities for revenue growth. Relying on data, like historical sales and analysis of the impact of past promotions, helps retailers avoid the twin perils of overstocking and understocking. Using irrefutable data from your inventory center means avoiding the most common inventory challenges.

Want to learn more about Inventory Management? Check out our must-read whitepaper, Optimizing Inventory Management for Telecom Retailers.