In today's day and age, business owners go for the best possible ways to maximize their online sales. However, excess inventory sales always bring a setback in revenue and results. If you don't have an appropriate inventory management system, excess merchandise can be a problem. Regardless of which industry your business is related to, you will eventually lose revenue and momentum.
Business owners need to manage excess inventory sales in today's competitive world. For example, an eCommerce website or a retail shop needs to sell excess inventory to maintain consistency in results. If you have too much stock, you must devise strategies to eliminate or sell them. To sell excess inventory, you must improve your promotional and pricing system. Since you are the business owner, your priority is to clear the stock you have piled up before introducing fresh supply to the market.
What is Excess Inventory?
If you have more stock for a particular product or have an entire product line to sell within a required timeframe, you can sell excess inventory or excess merchandise. In this case, the best approach is to identify ways to sell excess inventory. If you cannot do that, your eCommerce store must have space for old or excess merchandise. This space will stop it from manufacturing and bring new products in demand by the target market.
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Selling excess inventory can be difficult because either something needs to be fixed with your products or they have become outdated. Either way, you will be unable to sell excess inventory. Hence, the best way to experiment with your pricing strategies is to reduce the chances of overstocking.
Excess inventory sales are observed by online businesses or eCommerce stores that have already experimented with other marketing strategies to get rid of their stock. They use it as their final option to clear out the stock when there is no other way to cash out the money in the excess merchandise. If you want to sell excess inventory, you must have a long-term plan that will help you increase your revenue by raising prices once you are done with the inventory sales.
Importance of Selling Excess Inventory
1) Manage Orders Properly
An order management system is key to managing online sales and increasing revenue for a particular business. Although you must manage your marketing activities to increase product demand, you must also track when your customers place orders. If you cannot keep track of your customer orders, it will result in excess merchandise, making it difficult for you to sell excess inventory.
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You must have appropriate tools to manage your orders effectively if you run a business via an eCommerce store. A quality order management system helps you keep track of each order's status. In addition, if you are having issues with any order or product delivery, your system must be able to notify you timely. Therefore, you will devise a solution immediately or inform your customers about the issue.
If you manage your orders properly, you will increase your online sales and satisfy your customers. On the other hand, it is not suitable for your brand image or reputation that your customers have errors while placing their respective orders. Therefore, even in the case of an inventory sale, it is essential to keep track of your orders.
2) Focus on all Your Product Lines
If you have a successful business, there is a possibility that you have numerous product lines at your eCommerce store. Certain companies manage multiple product lines through cross-merchandising. When a business tries to approach a new market, it usually considers product line extensions or adding an entire list of new products.
In these situations, many businesses shift their focus from their existing target markets to new ones as they see an opportunity to increase their revenue streams. You need to pay attention to the marketing costs required to reach your current customers to avoid getting into trouble. It will result in too much stock, making it difficult for you to sell excess inventory. If you liquidate inventory rather than make some proper sales, you reduce your profit margin considerably. You must continue marketing and promoting your product lines to avoid selling excess inventory.
Best Strategies to Sell Excess Inventory
1) Sell Online
If you aren't selling products online, having excess inventory sales at your disposal brings motivation to build an online store. Because there is insufficient demand in the market, it will have a need elsewhere. Building an online store enables you to reach a wider audience, improving your chances of selling excess inventory.
Apart from creating an online store on Strikingly, you can also consider selling your excess merchandise on third-party apps like Amazon and eBay.
2) Offer Sales
If you are walking around the street and see a window of an eCommerce store saying "50% off sale", it will create an urgency within you to go inside. You don't need to tell your customers that you are cutting down the price of the products just because people aren't buying them. Instead, you can offer discounts to attract new customers and sell excess inventory reasonably. Although you will make little profit, it is better than seeing your unsold items sitting around your store.
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Being a business owner, you must have a strategic approach to your online sales. Here are some of the most efficient ways of making sales at your eCommerce store:
- Clearance: Clearance sales are said to be excess inventory sales. However, it provides your customers with an excellent opportunity to buy products at a discount that was previously unaffordable for them.
- Seasonal: Regarding eCommerce, different products sell at other times of the year. For example, heaters are likely to go down in sales during the summer season and are expected to peak in the winter season. Hosting a sale is a brilliant way to avoid generating excess merchandise when product demand is low.
- New sale: Since these sales have a psychological effect on the customers, you must notify them via emails, mail signs in your eCommerce store, or any other marketing method to ensure one sale per day. Customers will feel the urgency and be ready to make the most of the discounted goods.
3) Give Products Exposure
Exposure to products is usually a strategy for retail stores, but you must understand how to implement it even if you are not running a retail store. According to retail expert Christine Guillot, you can double or triple-expose your merchandise. In addition, she believes that promoting the same product in multiple places in your store gives you a better chance to attract customers.
If you own an eCommerce website, you can go through the website analytics to understand how the traffic flows into your store. Understanding your website analytics allows you to display your excess merchandise in high-traffic areas. Sometimes, overstocking or excess inventory is just down to needing more customers at your store.
4) Remarketing
You can re-examine your marketing strategy if you need something to sell excess inventory. If you are selling products through your online store, you can go through the following steps to revamp your marketing approach:
- Change keywords in product titles and meta-descriptions
- Take new pictures for your products
- Change the product placement in your store
Manage Inventory Sales on Your Strikingly Website
The best way to sell your eCommerce products is to build a quality website. If you don't have one, consider making one on an established website builder, such as Strikingly. Strikingly is a professional website-building platform that enables you to build a quality business website without breaking a sweat. You don't need any experienced web developer or coder to make your online store on our platform.
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All you need to do is register for a free account on Strikingly and choose the best website design for your online store. We provide our users with a compilation of responsive website templates, which means that both desktop and mobile users can access them. Apart from that, we will help you with all the technical aspects related to the development phase of your online store.
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When you establish an eCommerce store on Strikingly, we will provide you with multiple tools and features that will help you keep track of your orders, customers, and sales. Hence, you will recognize all crucial aspects of your business. You can provide multiple payment gateways to your customers to ensure a smooth checkout process. PayPal, Stripe, and Skrull are the three payment methods offered on Strikingly. You can accept payments or send a refund to your customers if they have applied for it.
Conclusion
Since you are a business owner, you must accept that you will eventually face the situation of selling excess inventory. You must know how to deal with and eliminate it without taking a financial hit. If you keep excess merchandise as part of your online store, your business will be draining.
The best way to sell excess inventory is to build an eCommerce website on Strikingly and utilize all the relevant eCommerce features. If you cannot make your website on our platform, you can consult with our Happiness Officers immediately. By relying on an eCommerce store on Strikingly, you can be creative in selling your inventory to the customers.
