A key part of a robust inventory management policy is to identify top marketing opportunities for the products, brands, categories and filters in your inventory. But how do you identify and track these opportunities to bring maximum reward?
Inventory will normally arrive into your site in a relatively poor state. Manufacturer inventory titles and descriptions are normally weak and contain only a few words. The first step to improving inventory quality is to elaborate on these descriptions and spend some time making the products sellable. When they arrive in a better state, then you can almost guarantee that several other websites will be using the same descriptions and titles. It’s incredibly important to change and adjust the descriptions to make them more unique
Inventory quality is normally a trade off between the amount of time you can spend on improving products and the performance of that product online. Ideally all products you sell would have several images, exhaustive technical descriptions, ideas about how they can be used and their benefits, weights, country of origin and anything else that would encourage customers in their journey to actually go through with a purchase. However, when you are working with a large inventory you will find you won’t have enough time to devote maximum effort to every product you sell so you should focus only on those that either sell or have the potential to sell. The golden rule of inventory optimisation is to focus on products with the best sales opportunities.
As time progresses, you will find that inventory that has the potential to sell will change. Choosing what to optimise and when needs careful monitoring and auditing. It’s important to not only carry out these checks at product level but to take it beyond to ensure that your category and brand data is also improved especially if you have groups of products which are selling well or could sell well.
In an average inventory of 400-500 products there are as many as 1000-2000 different opportunities. By opportunities we mean opportunities that an internet marketer can potentially address in order to improve sales. Some of the typical opportunities include:
Sales: In order to recognise sales opportunities, you will need to track and identify the most popular selling products within your inventory. Your best sellers can normally be optimised and marketed to sell more – working closely with your top sellers can be very beneficial. You will need to add photographs, technical details and unique content to these products. You will also need to look for potential product variations and then set high advertising budgets for these products.
Visitors: Look out for products attracting a great deal of interest because this interest can and should be converted into more sales. If the sales of these products are poor, it is an indication that something needs to be improved. Conducting a range of checks and activities such as content improvements, pricing and competitive analysis will help to improve the product conversion rate of these products.
Stock: You will need to monitor and predict your stock depletion rate and ensure that you can manage and replenish stock levels as necessary, in order to keep up with demand. If you do not have enough stock of your most popular selling product, this could cause difficulties and potentially cause you to lose customers. Likewise, overstocking with a product that is unlikely to sell very well will instigate an over commitment of capital that can be used better elsewhere.
Campaigns: You may find that product sales peak at certain times throughout the year; Mother’s Day, Easter, Black Friday or Christmas. As a result, it’s critical to plan your inventory to account for seasonal peaks and drops. If you don’t plan ahead of time, you risk having excess inventory that you can’t sell or not having enough to fulfil orders.
Cleargro is an advanced inventory management system aimed at identifying opportunities and tracking inventory related workflow that has been designed by Vertical Plus.
We have been developing and fine tuning ecommerce growth strategies since 2010 and we realised many of the opportunities for growth through marketing can be identified with some clever analysis of data and this is why we have developed Cleargro.
Cleargro offers some excellent features and in short will enable us to check, review, monitor, optimise and grow ecommerce businesses. It can automatically identify over 1200 unique inventory quality and inventory demand related opportunities and prioritise them accordingly. This enables you to know your business in order to grow your business. Cleargro is currently provided as a platform for our experienced Vertical Plus account managers and their ecommerce partners with the ultimate objective to encourage business growth.
Our average partner grows by 40% year on year using our ecommerce system, account managers and Cleargro. If you would like to talk to us about starting an ecommerce partnership, please get in touch: sales@verticalplus.co.uk.