How to Use Inventory to Make Decisions with Marvin Harris of Ovalz

Amazing FBA Amazon and ECommerce Podcast, for Amazon Private Label Sellers, Shopify, Magento or Woocommerce business owners, and other e-commerce sellers and digital entrepreneurs.

Inventory is the lifeblood of your Amazon business. It's how you make money, and it can also be how you lose money. The trick is to make sure that you're using inventory to make decisions in your business rather than letting it control your business decisions. This post will cover a few different ways that inventory can be used to manage your Amazon business. The new Way to Use Inventory Inventory management at its most basic is a system of passive records. Of course, it's important to get this organised. But to leave it at that is to miss a lot of critical insights into your consmers. IInventory isn't just a record of widgets sitting in warehouses. In fact, it is a system of engagement with customers. It’s more than just a record: it tells a story about each customer and the interactions you have with them over time. Inventory reconciliation can be one of the most challenging parts of managing your Amazon business, but it doesn't have to be! You can use inventory reports to avoid shortages or out-of-stock products, improve order fulfillment times, and make better decisions about how to grow your business. In this article, we’ll give you some tips on how to use inventory reports to actually see customer trends. You need a place where you aggregate data You need a place where you can aggregate data. This sounds like a no-brainer, but it’s actually the root issue with inventory management. You need to think about how your product is going to be sold, how you will get it out the door, and how your inventory system needs to support all of these things. The best way to do this is by thinking about how your inventory system will support each of these things individually. Then, once you’ve figured that out, you can start combining them together. Looking for inventory clues When you're looking to identify the root cause of your inventory gaps and ways to solve them, it's important to consider the inventory clues you'll find in your product data. First of all, when you look at current orders and sales for a particular SKU (stock keeping unit), you can see if there are any patterns that might indicate an upcoming gap. If a product is selling well and will soon be out of stock, it's time to order more from your supplier or manufacturer. This is especially true if your costs per unit are going down as well—that means you'll earn more profit by ordering more units! Next up: customer insights! While analyzing customer data may sound like an overwhelming task because of how much information is available with Amazon Fulfillment API tools like Seller Central Reports and Vendor Central Reports, we've got some simple tips for getting started on this fun project that could lead to some big improvements in your business strategy: 3 Key Data points to look for There are three key data points you need to look for: Date received to date bought by consumer Accounts receivable ageing by product Market sizing. This is how you get the size of your market. The first step is to identify what product or service you are selling, then using that as a benchmark to find out how many people are buying it. This can be done either through surveys and interviews with potential customers or by looking at sales data from your current customer base. Then, you can use this information to find out how much each of your customers are spending on your product or service. This can help you get a sense of how big your market is and what kind of potential there is for growth. Once you have this data, it becomes much easier to make financial projections about future sales and profits. The Magic of Aged Accounts Receivable Aged accounts receivable (A/R) is the term used to describe the amount of time that passes between when you sell a product and when your customer pays you for it. For example, if a customer buys an item from your store and doesn't pay within two weeks, the A/R would be calculated as 2 weeks.