Poor inventory decisions can be destructive. In the U.S. alone, overstocking, buying the wrong products and misallocating inventory accounts for 53% of unplanned markdowns—costing retailers around $300 billion in revenues, according to Coresight Research.
Your online business is especially at risk. With products available for purchase around the clock and competitors lurking at every corner, it’s easy to get blindsided and stock out at any time. That’s why our team is eager to announce the latest updates to our inventory planning suite. The suite combines powerful demand forecasting with new purchasing tools, making it even easier for you to restock on products while freeing up cash that’s tied up in inventory.
Read Also: Coronavirus and Inventory Planning: Why Traditional Models Are Failing
Find Your Optimal Order Frequency with Live Demand Forecasting
If you’re like most sellers, you’re likely operating within a 30-day purchasing window, hunkering down once a month to forecast products for the next 30 days. But even after you spend hours crunching the numbers, your margin of error is high—and you still leave yourself vulnerable to sudden events or competitive activity that occur mid-month.
Zentail’s demand forecasting tool frees you from this restrictive schedule. It empowers you to set your own reorder points, whether that’s every week, month or 90 days. You no longer have to rely on spreadsheets or manual calculation—simply check Zentail for real-time forecasts, which factor in lead times, holding costs, historical sales performance and other critical data.
Aside from preventing stockouts, Zentail helps you minimize your holding costs by recommending the perfect time to reorder. The platform not only protects you from the compounded costs of labor and storage space needed to hold stale stock. It also prevents you from losing out on thousands of sales due and not having enough working capital to spend on newer, better products.
By letting you reorder smaller quantities more frequently, Zentail’s forecasting system improves your inventory turnover rate and helps you reorder with precision.
Centrally Manage Your Purchase Orders in Zentail
Once you’ve identified what to reorder, you can create POs in minutes using Zentail’s built-in PO creator. Add and remove items from the PO template with a few simple clicks, or duplicate an existing PO from inside the platform.
Since Zentail is already your central database for product information, warehouse details and more, it can auto-populate many of the fields for you. It will also recommend how much of each product to reorder based on various factors beyond sales history. Determine the right quantity to reorder while saving yourself the headache of calculating amounts or creating POs by hand.
After you’ve created your PO, you can export it as a PDF or CSV to send to the appropriate vendors. Your POs will remain saved to your Zentail account, where you can mark them as submitted, accepted, drafted or canceled.
Automatically Track Any Inbound Shipments
Any “accepted” POs will automatically generate inbound shipments for your order. This prevents incoming stock from distorting your inventory counts or forecasts. For Amazon sellers, this feature is especially critical as it'll notify Amazon of future stock and allow you to continue receiving orders while your stock is en route. Once Amazon is notified of future stock, it'll also set the right shipping expectations with your buyers to avoid dings to your seller score.
Ready to Get Started?
Zentail’s inventory planning suite is built by sellers who, from firsthand experience, know the destructive power of poor inventory decisions. Our solution takes into account the unpredictable nature of ecommerce and helps you adapt to sudden changes no matter when they occur. With tools to speed up your end-to-end workflow, you can manage inventory more nimbly than ever before and ultimately save thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of dollars in working capital. Schedule a free consultation today to see the suite up close!
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