Inventory Management for the ‘Rush Hours’

When your customers come hunting, you better be prepared.

It’s obvious that being a seller, you’d love to have some customer feet coming in. The only thing you need is, they should neither leave empty-handed nor keep your pockets empty. Rush hours can be planned, but it’s not necessary that the stock planned particularly for those number of days might help you with your inventory management.

Rush hour, as it all happens real quick, you need to make sure that everything stays as planned.

Plan and Strategize the Inventory

Understanding your customer’s, your business’ and your own behavior is how well you will strategize for the rush hours. It’s all about how well you can be a competition for yourself.

Rush hour inventory = Demand x Duration of Sale   ✪

The rush hour will totally depend on the demand and the duration of the sale as mentioned above. This will eventually lead you to work on the quantity of the stock that needs to be drawn in specifically for this a rush hour sale.

There are always two cases when it comes to such discounts:

• In the first case, the retailer can decide to keep a limited quantity (first come first serve basis) which later disappoints the customers (because they are not able to get their hands on a good product at a comparatively cheaper rate). Retailers here analyze the ratio of happy customers compared to that of disappointed ones. Just because a certain stock was ‘planned’ and was sold out, the sale is said to be successful.
• In the second case, the retailer can give himself the liberty to get in some extra stock specifically when the planned stock is about to end and the demand is at peak. Selling the items at a discounted rate would eventually end up not making a lot of profit, but again, your business is not stopping.

Segment Special Holiday Offers

At the end of every year or at the beginning of every new year, brainstorm and work upon the holiday offers and discounts that you can put up, and how; you can’t simply sing ‘joy to the world’ from the very first month.

You should be aware that people who come to shop during the holiday sale are more likely to buy not for their own selves, but for people belonging to a different demographic. People are cost-conscious and there are high probable reasons for them to lose brand loyalty. When compared to normal sales, there are chances that you being a retailer can make an immense profit by efficiently managing your holiday sales.

 

Here, your inventory management will be based on the criteria like buyer’s age, persona, purchase behavior, etc. You need to analyze and figure out which type of product will be sold well and what category of product needs to be filled in the most (along with a safety stock).

 

 

It’s nothing more or less than hypnotizing your audience with the rush hour campaigns and making them suck up your entire inventory, ending up making tons of profit for yourself, but a huge benefit to the customers as well.

 

Pre – and Post – Sales Analysis

You need to figure out when and where, most importantly what can make you fall, and how. Risk analysis should always be done days before your sale. This will enable you to analyze the ongoing trend, what your customers would prefer to wear and how many of them will bother to come down and purchase it.

Gymshark, a famous gym-outfit manufacturer sold only black colored products on ‘Black Friday’. Although black is a color that is always loveable, but again, this was a risk!

 

 

Before and after every sale, there should always be a session of analysis of all the hip and happenings of the sale. About how much of stock is left from what was planned, how much was ordered again (if any), did safety stock come into action, did you go out of stock, etc. can be some of the subjects to discuss on.

 

Buying – Easy and Urgent

Create a rush, not just on the website or your storefront, try to involve as many marketing strategies, whenever you plan for a flash sale. If a customer receives constant notifications from your application, it will eventually bring some curiosity. Bringing to notice, there is a difference between a flash sale and a normal sale. Flash sales are always set for a certain batch of products or a flagship product, e.g. Xiaomi’s RedMi Note series phones – they are always sold through a flash sale. While normal sale doesn’t focus on any specific product.

Easy – Don’t make it very much complicated for the customers as they are already in a mindset that the sale would end soon. Less number of clicks will enable a rapid check-out. Also, make sure that your inventory management system is dynamic enough to tackle the constant updates through the website as well as the store. This will help you to keep a track on the sale-specific stock present in your warehouse.

 

Urgent – Try to make your website so product-sensitive that it can understand what the customer is looking out for and eventually refrain the customer to leave the website without purchasing that product, anyhow.

When it’s a flash sale, your inventory should synchronize in a somewhat different way. A good inventory management system will help you tackle this. Give the customer some time to make the purchase and also a chance to the others who missed to get their hands on that particular product. The moment your flash sale goes live, there are trillions of clicks on the ‘buy now’ button, it’s obvious that only a few will get the product in their cart. If a customer does make it to the cart, provide him some time to make the purchase, let’s say, 20 minutes. If at all the purchase isn’t done yet, remind. If still not done, make the product available again to the customers who are waiting for it in the queue, automatically. Constant update is made to the inventory, again, all in rush. Inventory on steroids, lol!

 

Flash sale always makes the delivery go cats and dogs. You need to make sure that you have efficient logistics linked to your warehouse to maintain the consistency. When it comes to your website, always highlight the delivery option, a side-card on the website would be an excellent idea to start with (as shown in the above image).

If you have less comparative manpower which can manage the shipments, but slowly; you need to try being upfront to the customers and inform them about the late delivery because of the flooding orders/shipments.

 

Conclusion

Whatever you do, however you do, make sure that you ain’t going out of stock.

Retailers which are all set for the rush hour sale have themselves all set for the coming success throughout the year, and probably in the future too.