4 Tips For Managing Your Amazon Inventory

Each year, Amazon-less sellers lose countless dollars in profit due to poor inventory management. If you want to avoid being one of those sellers, your working with a freelancer could be the solution you need.

In this article, we’ll discuss four ways an experienced freelancer can help you improve your Amazon inventory management processes, allowing you to focus on other important business tasks.

Help With Daily Tasks

Running out of stock can be a seller’s worst nightmare. All of the effort that you’ve put into generating traffic to your listing can result in increased sales for your competition if you’re not careful. Staying in stock is a delicate art, especially if you fulfill orders with Amazon FBA. After all, you don’t want to overstock, which can result in long-term storage fees.

Stale inventory also impacts your ability to invest in new products or restock items that are selling steadily. On the other hand, understocking to the point that you run out of stock can seriously impact your profits.

A freelancer who is well versed in Amazon inventory management practices can help you manage recurring tasks and predict demand to help keep your products in stock at the right levels and minimize excess inventory.

By understanding how much you have in stock, what current demand looks like, and how long your restocking lead times are for each product, the right hire can inform your inventory management decisions to save you time when reordering.

Anticipate Product Demands

Predicting demand and planning for seasonal inventory trends can be tricky, particularly when you have a variety of other tasks demanding your attention. By researching industry trends, looking at previous sales data, and staying in the know about what is selling on Amazon, the freelancer you hired can provide key insights to help you predict demand before restocking. Making informed inventory decisions based on data is easier when you have assistance with gathering the data!

A freelancer can also provide the perspective and inspiration you need to continue to grow your business. For example, if you task your freelancer with examining your slow-moving inventory each month and coming up with ideas for ads to improve sell-through rate or deciding whether it’s time to simply remove the inventory, you can continue to focus on more profitable tasks while keeping your Amazon inventory well maintained.

Resolve Stranded Inventory

If you are fulfilling orders via FBA, you’ll need to maintain a healthy Inventory Performance Index (IPI) score to avoid future storage restrictions. The score is calculated based on your excess inventory rate, sell-through rate, stranded inventory rate, and in-stock inventory.

Amazon provides alerts in your IPI dashboard in Seller Central with tips for reducing storage fees and carrying costs.

Fixing stranded inventory is an important task that can easily be delegated to the contractor you hired. Check for stranded inventory daily and follow Amazon’s steps for resolving it as quickly as possible. This is a simple way to help keep your IPI healthy, but it can be easy to overlook on a busy day or week.

Assigning this recurring task to a freelancer is a great way to identify any issues quickly and ensure that all the inventory you send to FBA fulfillment centers is sellable.

Your Amazon inventory manager should also look out for excess inventory and ensure that you have enough inventory in stock at FBA. They can alert you when your sell-through rate needs improvement and make suggestions to increase sales.

Maintain Supplier Relationships

Finding the right suppliers can be challenging. A detail-oriented freelancer can help you keep track of the details and compare suppliers to find the best fit for your Amazon business. The contractor you hired can also help manage and maintain your relationships with suppliers.

Keeping track of the supplier name, your main point of contact, mailing/ship-from address, contact information, MAP policy details, lead time assumptions, payment terms, purchase order instructions, and other details is essential to smart supplier relationship management.

You should have a system for maintaining this information so it is easily accessible for you as well as your inventory manager. A freelancer can create purchase orders, generate shipping labels, call suppliers, and much more, but it’s important to have the right information in place to make these processes as simple as possible.

Final Takeaways

Managing inventory can be time consuming for you as well as for the freelancer you will be hiring. To  automate some of these tasks and enable faster decision making, consider using Amazon inventory management software.

When it comes to selling on Amazon, there is no shortage of tasks to delegate to a freelancer. Inventory management software can help you stay in stock without overstocking, track your shipments, maintain a consistent supplier database, and more.

Whether you choose to manage these tasks manually or automate with software, a freelancer can take on some of the regular tasks so you can focus on growing your business.

If you’re ready to find a qualified freelancer to help improve your inventory management, FreeUp is here to help.