Whether your online shop is new or you’ve been in business a while, you need to come up with solid serial numbers when ordering items for store inventory control. Since you’re not a fortune teller, there’s no way to know for sure how many products are going to sell ahead of time, so you use a rough estimate. You can base your estimate on sales from the past three to six months, or longer. Forecasting is easier when you calculate using:
- Current growth rate
- Previous year sales
- Market trends
- Existing contracts or subscriptions
- Upcoming advertising
The trick to good inventory tracking is not to order too much or too little. Order too many items, and you run the risk of having unsold items languishing in a warehouse, costing you precious funds that could be better spent elsewhere. Order too few items and your shop’s reputation might take a hit when orders cancel due to lack of supply. With a quality inventory management system in place, forecasting accuracy should improve over time.