Drop Shipping and Inventory Management Hacks for your Rising eCommerce Platform

Drop shipping has helped online retailers increase their sales and profit over the years. As a sound business model, it had made the shipping directly to the customers easier because it has given the customers the freedom to choose from myriad of options without taking the burden of inventorying the every possible size and color of the products being offered. In fact, it had satisfied the demands among the eCommerce retailers that makes doing business on the internet an advantage. On the other hand, inventory management has helped retailers improve their cash flows by not spending huge capital balances in purchasing vast amount of inventory at once. And with an effective inventory management, retailers will be able to save handling and holding cost.
Provided that drop shipping allows higher potentials to gain bigger profit, broader product offerings, exploration of new product line without spending even a single cent, and save time from processing incoming loads of goods; while inventory management help you get a full control of the stock levels that is within your physical distribution systems, and be able to balance the need between product availability and in minimizing the stock holdings and the minimal costs – there’s always something that will prevent you from getting to the top of the B2B industry. These are;
• Overselling of products – Lack of visibility to the drop shippers’ inventory is the common downfall that often results to unfulfilled orders. Merchants can simply cancel such orders which could be frustrating on the part of the customer because one unsuccessful order is another negative rating. To avoid this, it is best to have multiple sources of certain product so that in case a supplier canceled an order, the other supplier will provide it to you. In case you are warehousing products, the bes thing that you could do is to avoid stock outages. Centralize your inventory management across all your sales channel and have inventory reports or alerts so that you will be able to reorder additional quantities of the product

• The difference of Drop-Shippers – drop shipping is a popular trend in the B2B industry, but finding the right one could be confusing especially if you are new in this business model. Many eCommerce sites promote that they are drop shippers only that is because they only act as the middleman of the products and charge more from the products offered to consumers. But what is worrisome about this is that they might not be the authorized distributors. So to ensure that you are dealing with authorized distributors, it is best to ask the brands directly.

• Inaccuracy and poor quality of the details provided about the products – When you drop ship, you are not selling the product rather, sell accurate and quality information about the products in your platform. But sine product data varies from one supplier to another, it is crucial to pay attention to the details. Issues on product details is often encountered if it is data-related because if different suppliers have the same shop keeping units or SKUs that depicts entirely different products, it would be a big dilemma for retailers with multiple suppliers. There’s always a possibility that upon uploading, the data might be overwritten and be replaced by a detail that refers to another product. To prevent this, you should add prefix code to SKUs that are identical before uploading that could help identify the supplier.
Another issue to keep in mind is the availability of the product. It is imperative to evaluate the products with regards to data supplied by the suppliers whether it is an active item or out-of-stock items, as well as other details like the weight which could cause issues with free shipping. Reviewing the data supplied before uploading it will eliminate the risk of missing important values.

• Decentralized and disintegrated order management, inventory management as well as accounting – Continuous connection between orders and available inventory is important because this will help you prevent running out of stock or slow product shipping. If there’s one thing that you really should be cautious about is receiving negative feedbacks because it will be your grounds from being removed in the marketplace. To stay positive and be on track, you’ll need to make ties with platforms that uses effective inventory management, order management and accounting like Oceantailer, because they will be able to aid you especially on holiday seasons were ordered tend to increase. With a centralize order management, you will be able to notify customers automatically about the order status through email which could reduce the number of the order status. Thus, customer satisfaction is improved. Plus the fact it could help you save time from accounting where it will reduce the errors from manual entries.