Realtime Inventory Visibility Key to Retail

How many ways do you sell to your customers? No matter how you answer, if you don’t know how much stock is moving through every channel you use, you’re losing money. Too much inventory sucks up your cash flow in carrying costs, while too little leads to stock-outs and lost sales. Furthermore, the more channels you use, the more complicated stock management becomes. And as companies develop multiple channels to increase revenue and brand awareness, those stock mismanagement costs add up, without realtime inventory visibility to manage the whole thing.

Realtime Inventory Visibility and the Omnichannel Dream

It’s a safe bet that you don’t reach customers through a single channel. Specifically, technology has embedded itself in customer behavior. Consequently, digital media drives 70% of retail sales. Customers find you through your website, social media, or even marketplaces. But, they also want options to buy online or in-store.

Thus, retailers strive to establish multiple channels to meet customer expectations. However, they have not found it easy to adapt to this omnichannel approach.

For example, retailers will show different prices for the same product online and in-store. Only 35% of retailers showed customers inventory available online, according to a report.  Meanwhile, only 33% of in-store associates can view their own inventory, effectively.

Obviously, realtime inventory visibility, effectively executed, is the key ingredient to multichannel sales, if not the omnichannel dream.

Realtime Inventory Visibility Within Your Grasp

According to Supply Chain Dive, retailers scramble for visibility by migrating from outdated software into the cloud. They see cloud integration as the answer to the omnichannel puzzle.

Indeed, a comprehensive cloud-based inventory management solution that integrates to all their channels is more cost effective than upgrading old, desktop software. It’s a cost-effective way for businesses to control stock, automate sales processes, and keep costs down across a supply chain made complicated by multiple channels.