Running an e-Commerce business normally means having a large amount of stock that you need to keep ready in time for customer orders.
Having somewhere to keep all of this stock can be quite a challenge, especially when you’re dealing with large numbers of orders. As you grow it may come to the point where you’re no longer able to keep all of your stock in your office without it feeling messy and cluttered.
If you’re finding that you’re running out of space or struggling to keep all of your stock organised, here are some of our top storage-saving solutions for eCommerce businesses including self-storage in London.
Make your Office a Functional and Organized Space
The first step to keeping on top of all your stock is to make sure that you have optimised your office to make it as organised as possible.
If you have no choice but to keep all of your stock in the office, you should at least invest in some functional storage solutions where you can manage all of your items. Whether this involves extra storage space, shelves, or storage rooms, all of these things can make it much easier to keep on top of all your stock without cluttering up peoples’ workspaces.
Find Storage Space in London for your Products
As your company grows and the customer orders start to increase, you may quickly find that you’re not able to keep up with your storage needs in the office alone.
When it feels like you’ve got stock in every corner of the office, and it’s started to get in the way of peoples’ work, you may want to start looking at external locations to keep all of your belongings. Self-storage is a great option in this case as it gives you the chance to declutter your office and find a flexible solution to your storage needs. Whether you want to pay by the box or for a full storage unit, storage space in London is easy to find and easy to manage no matter how big or small your company is.
Utilize Inventory Management Solutions
Once you’ve got yourself some additional storage space or made some extra room in your office, if you want to save some space and find the optimal way to store all of your belongings, you can look into the various inventory management solutions out there.
Inventory management systems are there to make it easier to store, manage, track, and distribute all of your stock no matter how much or little you have of it.
Not only will you be able to find the best way to organize your belongings and keep similar products close together, but you will also easily be able to see how many of each item you have of it, which you can then update on your website. These systems will help you to make better use of the space you have, so you won’t have to worry about your stock being a disorganized mess, or losing a specific item ever again.
Be Smart about the Amount of Physical Stock you Need
Just because you have lots of different items on your website, doesn’t mean you have to have hundreds of each item physically in stock.
If you keep an eye on your sales data, you should be able to get a good idea of how many orders for specific items you get every month. There’s not much of a need to carry more than what you expect to sell in a month any additional stock is just stock that you will either need to find space in your office for or pay to store elsewhere.
Be realistic about the amount of stock you’re selling every month and focus on having enough stock to keep satisfying your customers and meet their demand, but don’t have too much excess stock that you won’t know what to do with.
Be prepared for Busy/Slow Periods
Similar to the previous point, it’s a good idea to keep up with the latest sales data so you can ensure you always have enough stock to keep up with customer demand.
You should also keep your approach to stock levels dynamic and ready to be adjusted depending on the time of year or season. For example, you may find that your orders increase during the holiday season as people buy gifts. If you can anticipate this increase in orders, you should increase your stock to prepare for the demand in advance.
This may mean choosing storage solutions like self-storage that can be flexible with your needs. Whether you need to add a few more boxes or rent out a whole new storage unit, you should prepare for these fluctuations in stock requirements in advance so you never need to worry about selling out or not having enough stock in time for increasing customer demand.
Jason is the Marketing Manager at a local advertising company in Australia. He moved to Australia 10 years back for his passion for advertising. Jason recently joined BFA as a volunteer writer and contributes by sharing his valuable experience and knowledge.
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