There’s a certain art in managing your Amazon inventory. You want to have enough items to fulfil demand, but not so many you get dinged for long-term storage fees. In this post, SellerExpress will show you some tips on how to be a pro at this.
1. Pay Attention to Your Page Hits
It’s a simple concept, but one sellers tend to ignore: the number of page hits you get tends to be correlated with how many of each item you should be keeping in stock. If your Minions slippers just aren’t getting that many page hits any more, it’s because people aren’t as interested as they used to be.
It’s a little tricky differentiating between when page hits take a slight dip before rising again and when they fall for good, so use this in conjunction with other stats, like sales rank. Speaking of which…
2. Your Sales Rank Number Changes
No doubt, as an Amazon seller, you’re familiar with what a sales rank number is. But just in case you’re not, it describes how ‘saleable’ a particular product is. If it’s been a while since that item’s been sold, its sale rank number will be pretty low. But once someone scoops it up, the number goes up. In a nutshell, it tells you how recently something was bought, not how popular it is.
Either way, it’s an incredibly useful metric when it comes to managing your inventory. If an item’s sales rank is really, really low (i.e. a big number), you know it’s been a while since someone bought it. And if consistently stays low, you can take that as a strong sign that maybe you shouldn’t be stocking as much of it.
3. People Are Starting to Respond Negatively or Not as Positively as Before
Listen to what your buyers are telling you. If masses of them aren’t leaving rave reviews any more — either in the form of an absence of (positive) reviews or an increase of negative views — take heed! They’re trying to tell you something, and that’s that maybe you should consider changing your product or keeping less of it.
But before you take the drastic step of either decreasing its amount or taking out of your inventory entirely, examine what you’re doing on your product description page first. Are you writing about them as accurately, fully and efficiently as possible? Are your images in fine form? Are you promising the world on a product and not delivering? Check into all this first before taking action.
4. You’re Seeing More People Selling the Same Item
Everything in commerce, no matter what medium, relies on the old standby of supply-and-demand. If you’ve got a hold of an incredibly popular, faddish item, you’re afforded more flexibility. This is an awesome situation to be in because you can increase the number of that item in your inventory and play around with prices a little bit.
But if the situation is reversed and there are more people selling something than demanding it, you’re going to have to scale back a bit. There’s no sense in keeping a fully supply of, say, singing teddy bears if a whole new crop of Amazon sellers are selling to the same existing number of buyers. Use this as a chance to diversify your offerings.
5. Maybe Your Sales Are Trying to Tell You Something
Last but not least, we come to the most obvious point: your sales. There’s no clearer sign you have to adjust your inventory than sales metrics. If they go up, you need more items. And if they go down, you don’t need to stock them as much. It’s really that simple.
