How To Perfect Inventory Management With WooCommerce

There’s no getting around it: effective inventory management is absolutely essential if you want your WooCommerce store to succeed. Even the most promising sellers can end up falling flat on their faces if they don’t have a good inventory management system in place.

Effectively tracking and managing your WooCommerce store’s stock means you can optimize your operations and prevent a number of worst-case scenarios, including having to refund dozens of customers due to stockouts, or ending up with far too much stock that you just can’t shift.

This article offers some top tips on how to effectively manage your inventory management on WooCommerce.Know Your Turnover Ratio

You’ll be able to evaluate the performance of your inventory by calculating its turnover (i.e. the cost of the products sold divided by the average inventory balance).

If you have a high turnover rate, it suggests your stock management strategy is strong.

Predict Customer Demand

Demand forecasting will help you to prepare for peaks and dips in customer activity by ensuring you have enough stock for all scenarios.

It’s normal for demand to fluctuate at certain points of the year, and understanding your customer behavior will help you better prepare for the ebbs and flows of eCommerce. There’s software you can use to analyze your historical sales data and use this strategically when ordering in more stock.

Manage Your Safety Stock

Your safety stock, or stock you can fall back on if you see a surge in demand, is also key to the inventory management process.

You need to have enough stock to fulfill customer orders at any time—but how much safety stock do you actually need? That’s a question only you can answer, based on your historic customer data. It’s important to find a good middle ground, since you don’t want to have an excess of inventory taking up valuable space.

Categorize Your Inventory

Categorizing your inventory based on demand, turnover rate, and value, means you can be more efficient with your stock management.

The ABC analysis method is a good one to use for eCommerce inventory management. In this system, the “A” stock is the most closely and precisely managed, while “C” products are the least closely controlled, and “B” items fall somewhere in between.

Use Inventory Management Tools

You absolutely should be using tools and technology to simplify the inventory management process on WooCommerce wherever possible.

This saves you the job of having to manually update spreadsheets or (even worse) write everything down in a notebook.

You can automate these processes with inventory management software, and if you sell on multiple platforms, you need a WooCommerce Inventory Sync tool that will automatically sync your inventory levels between WooCommerce and other sales channels.

Of course, you may still need to make the occasional manual adjustment as needed to account for returns or damaged goods.

Final Word

Managing your WooCommerce store’s stock doesn’t have to be difficult.

Follow these guidelines and take advantage of WooCommerce's built-in features, and you should have no problem streamlining your inventory management processes.