eCommercize Strategies for Your Online Success

As your online sales grow and you increase your inventory you need a system to store all of your merchandise. There is nothing worse than making a sale, receiving the buyers payment then having to tell the buyer you can’t find the item. Creating a system when your inventory level is low will make growing your business much easier.

I have thousands of items in stock that are both listed and unlisted online and I created an inventory system to keep them under control. I have several eBay stores and sell on other venues too but I have one organizing system. I created my organizing system when we lived in a small house that really didn’t have room for all of my inventory. In fact, in the winter months much of the inventory was stored in my greenhouse outside.

We moved into a bigger house with no garage so I spent a year selling out of two bedrooms and the guest bathroom (my shipping department). The bathroom was good because I would store all of my shipping supplies in the tub and pull the curtain across to hide it. I had big shelf units that I bought at Home Depot and put wheels on them. They were all packed into the bedrooms but could be rolled out to get to the inventory.

My husband finally built his dream garage and he built it big enough for both of us to pursue our goals. My side is almost 2,500 square feet with two floor to ceiling pallet racks. I have a designated photo area, shipping area and inventory area.

I call my low tech organizing system Bin-ventory. My definition of bins are the 56 qt clear or opaque plastic containers with lids. They can be stacked up to four high if they are aren’t too heavy. Now is the best time of year to buy them because almost everyone has them on sale.

I have 30 numbered bins for regular merchandise, 22 bins for china labeled by brand or holiday and 15 bins for new inventory just coming in the door. I have a small 5-1/2″ by 8-1/2″ binder with two numbered pages for each bin to keep track of the inventory.

When I bring in new inventory items they go into the NEW ITEMS bins near the table where I photograph my merchandise I am going to sell. I throw the receipt in the bin with the items so I know how much I paid before I start listing.

Once or twice a week I go out and take pictures of the new items, get measurements and weight and write up a simple description on paper. Then the items get put away in one of the numbered bins and written in the Bin-ventory book. I keep like bins together. Bins 1 & 2 have jewelry and silverware in them, bins 11-12-13 have stuffed animals, bins 22-30 have books.

When I sell an item I look in my book and see what bin the item is in. I take the item out of the bin, cross it off my list and ship it. The items aren’t written in any order but it is still quicker to flip through the book to find where the items is stored than to pull each bin down and look in it. It’s simple, doesn’t rely on electricity or the computer working and it’s easy to add pages to my book.

I recently acquired more than 700 magazines that I am going to sell. I went to a live auction and bought a couple of file cabinets for $5 each to put them in. It’s an easy storage solution.

No matter how you organize your inventory the key is to make it your system and use it consistently. Test out my system or find one that works for you and use it. You never want to tell a paying customer, “Sorry, I lost your item”.

Related posts:

1. Make Sales Based Upon New Year’s Resolutions

Tags: managing inventory, organizing inventory, organizing products, selling on amazon, selling on ebay, selling online, storing inventory

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 3rd, 2010 at 12:49 pm and is filed under Planning. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.