In today’s competitive e-commerce environment, saving every bit of margin possible is crucial for future growth. But with so many moving pieces for retailers to focus on, it’s easy to neglect important business areas, notably, your inventory.
According to Veeqo, 43 percent of small businesses don’t track their inventory at all, and 43 percent of all retailers rank inventory management as their number one day-to-day challenge.
What can be done to simplify inventory management? As it turns out, a lot of things. Here are four startups streamlining inventory management.
Inventory management systems are nothing new, but a cloud-based platform that integrates with a variety of other business applications is a revelation for the e-commerce industry. TradeGeckoraised a $17 million round in late June of 2018 to take its e-commerce inventory management software to the next level. TradeGecko empowers both retailers and wholesalers with the tools to make better decisions. On top of inventory data, the platform includes order fulfillment information, customer relationship data, real-time business reports and sales forecasts.
Consumers are buying more goods online, but they’re also returning them at unprecedented rates, in some cases exceeding 30 percent. Optoro, another startup that received funding in late June to the tune of $233 million, is a godsend to the costly, time-consuming reverse logistics process.
Through Optoro’s predictive analytics platform, e-commerce merchants can decide the best path for returned or overstocked goods to recover as much revenue value as possible. Doing so streamlines the reverse supply chain, cuts operational costs, and most importantly, reduces environmental waste by extending the usability lifecycle of products.
Despite what many believe, brick-and-mortar retail stores aren’t going anywhere, even if it’s easier than ever to learn how to build an e-commerce site. However, the brick-and-mortar ecosystem we’ve known to-date will look a lot different in the future.
One crucial aspect of future retail stores is the efficient use of space.
Celect is a big data predictive analytics platform that helps retail planners and merchandisers optimize inventory by analyzing a store’s location and customer shopping behavior to understand how purchasing decisions are made. Celect gives retailers a forecast of future demand, helps them leverage their existing data and identifies revenue loss caused by out-of-stocks and overstock markdowns.
As mentioned above, store layout will be a deciding factor of future brick-and-mortar success, but so will product minimalism. Instead of having many products on hand for shoppers to sift through, retailers will use smart inventory strategies to sell more products with less stock. This will be especially true in brick-and-mortar fashion retail. Nextail Labs uses advanced analytics and optimization algorithms to give fashion retailers dynamic inventory data to inform their every decision. These include determining how many units of a product to buy, when to introduce new products or open a new store, when to replenish products and how to rebalance inventory among various store locations.
These four startups streamlining inventory management will forever change the retail experience. Dynamic inventory analysis, predictive big data, full-service SaaS platform interfaces — among other burgeoning technologies — are game-changers in both brick-and-mortar retail and e-commerce. Retailers can now effortlessly track their inventory and reap the profits by keeping items in stock, reducing overstock and gaining greater visibility to handle seasonal demands. These companies and technologies are yet another illustration of the unprecedented golden age in which today’s consumers live.
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