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Which web-based software would you recommend for home inventory management?

What inventory management software is good for small online retailers?

  • Our business is growing and making inventory projections "by hand" is pretty hard... in 6 months, it'll be impossible. What do people use? Home-grown systems? Open source software with tweaks? Software that can plug in to a wide variety of shopping carts?

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    ========================================================== NOTE:  I have completely reworked this post because Inventory Management is starting to really become an issue for the startup community - with so many new entrants into fashion & e-commerce in general. The new piece will be as complex as - . To make this easy, I have built Google Spreadsheet integrations to:  - Magento:  Gets your historical data out  - Google Analytics:  Gets your demand signals out  - Mailchimp:  Gets your Email Data out (most likely, one of your main rev. channels) As examples - I am going to build this off of two case study companies: 1.  () - It's a blind read since I don't have any relationship with them outside of being a customer 2.  http://Manpacks.com ( & ) - I help them occasionally - less and less considering they are now fucking about with the big boys of San Francisco these days. Stay tuned -> it should be going up this weekend.  This is intended to really blow the socks off ========================================================== My Background with PhotoJoJo No offense mate, but I had not heard of you before - so I jumped in, purchased the fisheye lens and said "WTF, let's figure out how to help this cat".  Considering the # of questions that Amit is following regarding the inventory management subject, this is obviously something important and the perfect opportunity for Quora to ride to the rescue [Note: I have no affiliation with Quora - just a user who like knowledge dissemination] HEY -> who would have thought that posting a question on Quora could have turned into a Revenue generating experience? Cool... Now we have a baseline.  Let's start rocking & rolling on the Inventory management Equation. Stupid Quote:  Best predictor of future behavior is past behavior [General rule of thumb for dissecting your store: Geography* -> Volume (High/low)** -> Department (Mens, womens, home furnishing) -> Sub-Cat (Men's - Suits vs Men's - Young Mens) -> Brand Composition (Weighting popularity & Profitability of each brand component) -> Category Mix (Shirts,pants,sweaters) -> Style Mix -> Size.] From a retailers perspective, here is my suggestion for employing your GA e-commerce  data to inform better forecasting. There are 4 main toggle variables to analyze and attribute to your sales data. 1. AverageSize = Weighted Avg. Sizing Matrix by Style (SumProduct in Excel of the unit composition i.e. s,m,l,xl or for footwear 8, 8.5, 9.0 etc) 2. AverageStyle = Weighted Avg. Styles/category (SumProduct again here based on your composition) 3. CategoryWeight = Weighted Avg for the categories (i.e. Shirts or Pants) 4. Overbuy = 1+X% that you are going to allocate for fill ins. Be careful here because this can get a retailer & a brand in a LOT of trouble. DoorsWeight = [optional] if you are a multi-door chain take a simple revenue % for each door and then sum The Demand Build: 1. Find your historical seasonally adjusted growth rate in units sold & dollars per category (A in your regression analysis) i.e. Men's Sport Shirts = +3%, Men's Pants = +4% (The seasonal adjustment is key here as obviously you will sell more pants since FW10 just dropped). 2. Marketing Factor - This is where you can allocate a seasonal weighting factor to your investments in promoting the brand. For example, you can say that we will throw a party at the store to promote the brand, when we have done this in the past we will see X # increase in sales. If you are using the interwebs are your primary medium of promotion, use your google analytics annotation feature to note traffic & in-store demand correlations. 3.  Blog Hits - Whose going to post stuff about what you are retailing this month?  How much are they retweeted. Take the product of the 4 toggle variables above & add in Seasonal Factor and Marketing factor and you have your demand curve. ________ How does this work for PhotoJojo _____________ GREAT! That was fucking complex -> let's make it more relevant to you. 1.  Are you setting up your GA correctly to track by the category level? Product? Variation? For example, your store super-designy (which I like), but doesn't give you the navigation data to make actionable decisions.  You have 69 Products (4 items/row * 16 rows + 1 solo) 2.  Find your trend as to what is performing well for you and then you can decide what to build moving forward. Data you need to aggregate & source: 1.  Google Ecommerce data Export 2.  Shopping Cart Data Export for Products Sold 3.  Sales Order Data - the SO you placed to vendors 4.  Email marketing Data - Did a newsletter mention a product in the store? 5.  FedEx/UPS Flatfile export of ship-to & cost.  I am assuming that you are marking up shipping by at least 15% (considering the size of the your items, I would push for 25%) 6.  Cost of Fulfillment - Total outgoing shipping costs from your 3PL.  If your doing it yourself, then put a $ value of your time/hr and weight by the # of hrs that you spend on picking/packing/fulfillment Apps/Tools: - GA - Obviously -  - Funneling - - Quickbooks Manufacturing & Wholesale (if your Google Apps, you can try http://myERP.com, but it's WAY more than what you need for this).  - Microsoft Excel  - Time - Honestly, the best thing that you can do for your shop is to INTIMATELY understand the data. Metrics that you should be considering: 1.  Avg Days in Inventory - the # of days from when you purchase the goods 2.  Category Performance - What categories are performing the best for you? 3.  Shopping Cart Abandonment - Why are they leaving? 4.  Shipping Profitability - Does the amount of $$ you charge for shipping cover fulfillment 5.  Gross Margin/Shipment - Load all your costs (WHSL, Inbound freight, PPC, Email Marketing, Fulfillment, & Shipping costs into the model) 6.  Rev/Category & GM/category 7.  # of Units/Category 8.  Click-Through Rates & Sell-through Rates/Conversion Rates Once you have the data build a really big excel - I'll show you how to automate the import via VB in a little bit [I am fully prepared to get hammered for the Excel reference, I start every data set analysis by hand in excel.  It helps me visually see what's going on in the data] So you need the historical data to build the bayesian curve - Take a look at the link below the image for some more complex applications. https://www.box.net/shared/j6ix4kise4 Additional Resources:    - http://andrewchenblog.com/list-of-essays/ - He's a bloody legend  - He is really nice & probably the God on the subject    - Local Legend (remember those t-shirts from when we were kids)  - Probably one of the best resources in the city for constructively understanding the qualifying factors of what your funnels & metrics are telling you.  - Highly recommended Background - Introduction to Logistics - YES a TEXTBOOK!!! https://www.box.net/shared/ef4p0q81ui I built you a QUICK [emphasis on the QUICK - I'll refine later] Financial Model for framing how this can all impact your purchasing decisions. https://www.box.net/shared/4myp09vn81 [Note: I spent like 2 hrs on this and it needs like 4 more... but I gotta get back to work...] Other Good Quora-ish that have good stats and figures:

Matthew Carroll at Quora Visit the source

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Inventory management is just one part of the whole package that http://www.skuiq.com provides, along with a consolidated sales dashboard. This solution is suitable for either Brick and Mortar retailers or Omni Channel retailers, and can be used with Lightspeed, Erply, Vend, Quickbooks and many other POS systems.

Alex Johnson

There are no.of softwares are there in market. The http://columbusapp.co/portfolio-item/inventory-management-for-small-business/ i refer columbus.Increasingly, small to medium size businesses are facing quite a crunch in procuring an automation for their Inventory management. The business of Inventory management solutions Cloud based SaaS warehouse and inventory management system. Columbus can solve your complex supply chain management issues easily.http://columbusapp.co/ 30 seconds to signup. Simple to use. Beautifully designed interface. Handle simple to complex supply chain scenarios.

Somaraju Nagalakshmi

There are many inventory management systems available in the market. Some of them are open source systems, some of them are upcoming products on SaaS specially for online retailers and others are the biggies like Oracle, SAP, Microsoft, etc. Considering that your business is at initial stage of growth, which will be quite exponential, you would definitely required a system, not only for managing inventory but also for managing your warehouse operations. Being an ERP consultant myself, I have seen many growing online retailers who first implement order and inventory management system and later on they have to move to an order fulfillment system, i.e., your back-end operation system. Although most of the web-stores provide a basic inventory management system, it will be tough to maintain the accuracy of the warehouse inventory with that of the web-store inventory unless you don't integrate the two. Open Source systems such as Openbravo, OpenERP, etc. do provide you with the functionality of Inventory management as a part of their ERP suite. Other than than, you have various specific inventory management apps however sooner or later you will have to go for a back-end operation systems to support the scalability of your business. However, if your business is growing, I would suggest you to check out other established products in the market such as eRetail, which is specifically built to address the needs of an online retailer's business. This product is highly customizable and have 24x7 support and is already serving many eCommerce players.

Nikunj Agarwal

There are many options available for small online retailers. Some of them are as follows:   http://www.softwaresuggest.com/profitbooks-inventory-management - Amazingly simple and fastest amongst the list of Inventory Management software for small businesses.   http://www.softwaresuggest.com/marg-counter - Complete retail chain software with all essential modules like sales,  purchase, statistics calculation, graphical presentations, P & L,  MIS etc.   http://www.softwaresuggest.com/retail-graph - Complete Retail Management System that offers small and mid-market  retailers a complete point-of-sale solution that can be adapted to meet  unique retail requirements. http://www.softwaresuggest.com/inventoria - A simple inventory control system. With inventoria you’ll be streamlining your inventory processes within minutes. If you want to see more inventory management software for your retail store, you can check at http://www.softwaresuggest.com/inventory-management-software

Sanjay Darji

There's a couple good ones on the market, but realistically it all depends on what you're looking for in inventory management software. "By hand" is definitely not the best route! I'd recommend you give http://www.erplain.com a try. They have a https://erplain.net/user/signupand are catered for small businesses with 0 to 20 employees. It's cloud based so you can access everything on the go.Here's a few snapshots of the platform:Updating your shipping status... Creating sales orders...

Youssef Eid

You can consider either an ERP or cloud-based software.If you are a small online retailer, a cloud-based software is much more affordable as you pay on a monthly basis. In addition, you will not have to worry about maintenance and software updates as a cloud-based software is usually managed by the vendor.An option you can consider is https://www.tradegecko.com/, which can plug into a variety of eCommerce websites like Shopify, Magento, Bigcommerce, WooCommerce and more. In addition, TradeGecko also syncs with Xero and QuickBooks.Disclosure: I am currently working for TradeGecko.

Alicia Tsi

It really depends upon what kind of business you are and how you run things. You could try a free POS solution if you are smaller to test out how it works and whether it is right for your business. This blog lists a few really good options. However, longterm you'll wanna choose one to stick with if you plan on growing :) If looking for free ones check out: http://blog.capterra.com/the-top-6-free-and-open-source-pos-solutions/ If you want something a little more longterm and that has room to grow check out: http://blog.capterra.com/a-comparison-of-5-of-the-most-popular-pos-solutions/

Elizabeth Ann Rubio

You can try http://megaventory.com which is specifically designes for small businesses and in particular we've found online retailers benefiting significantly from it. As for covering your needs on projections Megaventory can provide you with exports of its data which can then be analysed in a spreadsheet for insights.

Dimitris Athanasiadis

A QuickBooks add-on , Fishbowl Inventory Software is one of the most commonly used inventory management application. It is definitely suitable for online retailers. For small retailers I would suggest Fishbowl hosting as it will save you from the trouble of installing and maintaining software. Your cloud host will take care of upgrades and you can scale up or scale doen your resources as your business requirement. The best part is that you will be paying only for what you used instead of paying for expensive hardware with low utility. Other than being economic cloud computing offers all time secure accessibility which allows users to work beyond time or geographical restriction. To know more: - http://www.myrealdata.com/fishbowl-inventory-hosting.html

James Watson

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