How to manage Inventory during the sales season?
September 11, 2023
Products with a seasonal inventory are those that sell more often during particular seasons of the year. Weather, events, and holidays might affect how much demand there is for certain things. It is distinguished by its transient nature because demand for it only spikes sometimes. To guarantee that supply levels satisfy consumer demand during peak seasons but aren’t excessive during slower seasons, seasonal inventory has to be carefully planned and managed. Businesses, both online and offline, might gain by anticipating seasonal patterns.
Examples of Seasonal Inventory
Holiday Items
- Christmas, Diwali , Raksha Bandhan, and other holidays can have an impact on your business even if you don’t offer holiday-specific goods.
- For most holidays, you might be able to develop seasonal promotions by working with your sales and marketing teams.
- To evaluate whether the holidays were the source of any sales surges, review your sales history and compare them to any holidays that fall close to those dates.
- For instance, since there is often a lot of outside eating during the Fourth of July weekend, prepared foods, cooking supplies, soft drinks, paper plates, plastic utensils, and decorations all see increased sales.
- If you own a landscaping or pet-sitting service, get in touch with your clients weeks beforehand to find out when they are departing on vacation.
The Four Seasons
- If you’re not prepared to capitalise on early demand, your competitors may gain market share from you if winter arrives a week earlier than usual or your location sees extreme temperatures two weeks sooner than typical, warns inventory management software provider Emerge.
- Keep a careful watch on weather forecasts and be ready to create, sell, and transport a seasonal product earlier than usual if the weather has any impact on your sales.
Clothing Sales
- The seasons also alter clothes shopping patterns in three ways, in addition to how the weather affects purchases of specific items and services.
- The fashion calendar is the first impact that the seasons have on apparel sales. Seasonality has an effect on clothing sales.
- For example, savvy consumers are aware that the winter, when demand for these seasonal products is low, is the greatest time to purchase swimming suits.
- As shops want to get rid of excess inventory so they don’t have to keep it, fall is another season when prices on summer apparel decline.
School Supplies
- If you produce school supplies and can’t sell them before students return home for the summer, you can be left with a warehouse full of unsold goods.
- This is particularly troublesome if your products are influenced by trends or fashion.
- In order to establish the inventory you need to have on hand and when to make it available to capitalise on back-to-school demand, stay in touch with parents and children via your marketing department.
Home-Care Products
- A schedule of typical seasonal repairs and improvements is followed by homeowners when maintaining their properties.
- For instance, they could swap out the air filters and batteries every three months.
- Get your lawn equipment, mowers, patio furniture, and barbeques ready for the spring.
- Winterizing a house, as well as outdoor equipment and furnishings, begins in the autumn.
- In the spring, homeowners power wash their homes and driveways and stain their decks.
Tips to manage inventory during sales
Look at past sales patterns
Examining historical sales trends is one of the finest strategies to enhance forecasting. By doing so, you may have a better understanding of what and when clients are most inclined to purchase a product. Utilising this knowledge, you may modify inventory levels as necessary. Software for inventory management is used by retailers to gather and process data for forecasting.
Inventory Management Software
There are various excellent platforms for inventory management software available. The ideal one will have a strong automated component, such as real-time updates to your inventory levels and delivery statuses. Some even offer to do studies and sales forecasts on your behalf. By doing so, you’ll always be dealing with reliable data and have some basic knowledge.
Collaboration with Suppliers
Working together with your vendors can help you advance your goal. They can make sure you receive your orders on schedule and can help you restock your stock as needed throughout the busiest period of the year. Give your suppliers plenty of advance notice and follow up to find out how their stock levels are doing.
Additionally, it’s crucial to cultivate strong connections with your vendors by consistently making your payments on time and attending to their needs in a polite and timely manner. They will find it simpler to collaborate with you as a result, which should assist you obtain what you want when you require it.
Continuous improvement
A thorough grasp of your company’s, market’s, and team’s strengths and limitations is necessary for successful seasonal inventory management. Utilise the inventory management strategies, tools, and techniques that best suit your situation.
Finally, developing a system and culture that is designed for and supports continuous development is the key to success for seasonal products. No system is flawless or flawless always. However, one that incorporates review time into the process and anticipates change is always preferable than one that does not.
Supply Chain Visibility
Both interdepartmental planning and inventory management require visibility. To effectively analyse the condition of your inventory and streamline order fulfilment, it’s essential to have real-time insight across your supply chain and an awareness of where your stock is located.
Organizationally, tearing down departmental barriers makes ensuring that teams aren’t operating against one another. You require a solution to address all of these issues and enable teams coordinate their inventory positioning, financial choices, and business planning by giving your whole organisation access to a single source of truth.
AI and Automation
Inefficiency, misunderstandings, and human mistake are all eliminated by an AI-based automated solution, which also provides your team with the data they need to make informed, data-driven planning choices.
These systems make use of adaptive machine learning engines, which swiftly analyse data, identify demand patterns, and quickly adjust to shifting trends. This increases the flexibility of your supply chain and enables you to keep up with shifting consumer expectations and seasonal demand swings.
Machine Learning
Machine learning is one of your greatest allies when it comes to seasonality. It classifies seasonal goods, detects causes of external demand, and coordinates marketing campaigns. Additionally, it eliminates demand noise to produce a clearer, more precise baseline estimate.
Allocating
The item will be on the shelf when and where the consumer wants it if the allocation is done correctly. A solid allocation strategy uses machine learning skills to distribute goods to the right areas, reducing the potential for human mistake.
Your company’s capacity to maximise each SKU’s profitability—while the product is still in demand—can result in greater margins, more sales, lower expenses, and increased planning efficiency because your seasonal items have short lifespans.
Conclusion
Weather, events, and holidays might affect how much demand there is for certain things. It is distinguished by its transient nature because demand for it only spikes sometimes. Christmas, Diwali , Raksha Bandhan, and other holidays can have an impact on your business even if you don’t offer holiday-specific goods.
Keep a careful watch on weather forecasts and be ready to create, sell, and transport a seasonal product earlier than usual if the weather has any impact on your sales. Utilising this knowledge, you may modify inventory levels as necessary. By doing so, you’ll always be dealing with reliable data and have some basic knowledge. Additionally, it’s crucial to cultivate strong connections with your vendors by consistently making your payments on time and attending to their needs in a polite and timely manner.
