One of the potentially challenging tasks of running an online storefront on your website is accurately and efficiently managing your website inventory. Because you dropship, you don’t have to go out to a warehouse and try to count every unit, or even go into your back room and move cabinets around to find everything. Instead, you have to rely on your wholesale vendor’s records in order to keep track of your own website inventory for your products.
There are several ways to go about tracking your wholesale suppliers’ inventories and getting your own website inventory in line with those numbers. Some ways are much more complex and time consuming than others.
One way you can manage your website inventory is with a manually-created database, or with your own database management software. In this type of configuration, you gather the inventory data from your supplier’s web site and manually enter it into the software. You update this information on a regular basis, probably at least daily.
This is the least efficient method of doing things. First, there are the extra steps of actually having to manually pull and re-enter the inventory data. Second, this configuration is the most likely to leave your customers stranded as your supplier runs out of an item that you keep selling. If you currently manage your website inventory this way, you should consider alternatives.
Many wholesale vendors now offer an electronic export of their inventory data. You may be able to pull that data directly, and update your own database in a more automated fashion. This lets you keep better tabs on your supplier, and it eliminates some of your work. Still, you have to monitor your database to make sure that you don’t run out of a particular item, and that when you do you have to manually update your website.
In an ideal situation, you will automate the entire process. Some wholesalers offer a full integration package that will not only electronically update you as to the inventory status of an item, but that can actually interface with your ecommerce software in order to let it know if a given item is out of stock. This means that your customers won’t be able to buy an item if it’s out of stock, because your actual website inventory is updated in real time.
If you run a dropship business, talk to your wholesale supplier to see what kinds of inventory management interfaces might be available in your situation.
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