5 Tips to prevent Overselling in your Ecommerce Business

No customer wants an ‘out-of-stock’ message, so you need to balance ordering enough stock to serve your customers – and its drain on cash flow – with your warehouse storage capacity and having too much stock on-hand.But the most specific problem business owners faced – and the one that could cause the most damage – was overselling.

With stock listed on multiple channels, you are at risk of overselling if you don’t update your listings quickly and manage your inventory effectively.

It’s where you accidentally sell your last item of stock to two different customers, on two different channels.One of those customers is going to be very disappointed if you can’t fulfil their order. And they’re likely to go elsewhere to find what they need – and will probably never come back.

On top of that, if you do end up overselling too many times on marketplaces like Amazon, you might even find your account suspended.

There are some products you might be able to source with a 24/48-hour turnaround. Other stock might take you a couple of weeks to get back in.Make sure you know which products require a longer order time, and re-order early when your stock gets to a set level.

Any good stock management software should allow you to sort and filter by stock levels.

You might find boxes have been broken, packaging has ripped, or perishable products are out-of-date. Older items may even have been updated with newer versions.Managing your actual stock is as important as managing stock levels, so keep your picking and packing areas as clean and organised as possible, and always practice the FIFO method – First In, First out – to ensure products are rotated and any older stock gets shipped out before newer stock.

If you use a fulfilment service, this is out of your hands, though they are likely to have an efficient system in place to keep stock rotating correctly.

But if you do oversell (or there’s a sudden surge in demand), you know you always have this reserve that you can use to fulfil the order and then top back up.However, the problem with this is that you need to have a sufficient cash flow to purchase and keep this stock (essentially they’re unusable spares) and the space in your warehouse to store them.

That’s why it’s important for you to complete regular stock takes, to help make sure all your levels are as accurate as possible.Although you might want to complete full stock takes every now and then (2 or 3 times a year perhaps) you don’t want to be counting every single product, every single week.

Instead, you just need to make sure that all outgoing stock is tracked efficiently, and all new, incoming stock can be added seamlessly to your existing figures.

Where possible, you’ll want to automate this process, and reduce the potential for human error. That’s where inventory management software like ChannelGrabber can help.

But – you could miss out on sales.What if you have 5 times as many orders on Amazon as eBay, and you have stock sitting around, waiting for eBay orders whilst your Amazon listing has sold-out?

That’s why you need multichannel inventory management software like ChannelGrabber.

It allows you to sell all your stock across every channel. But more importantly, it synchronises your stock levels in real time – so if one item sells on your own webstore, stock levels are automatically updated on every other channel too.

This means you don’t need to worry about overselling, because your stock levels will be the same on every channel, and will always be updated when an order comes through on any of those channels.

Simple export and import options also make stock taking a lot easier too. You can export all your current stock levels to a spreadsheet and quickly check these with the actual products in your warehouse.

And when you get any new inventory in, simply update the numbers on your spreadsheet and import into ChannelGrabber with a few easy clicks.

All your stock levels will be updated across every channel, so you can quickly replenish any low stock listings and make sure you don’t miss out on any sales.

ChannelGrabber helps you: 

• Quickly and easily check stock levels of all products
• Update stock levels without any hassle when you get new stock in
• List all your stock across every channel
• Automatically update your stock levels on every channel, in real time, whenever you make a sale.

As soon as you start selling on more than one channel, you will start to face the potential problem of overselling on one or more of your products. Some circumstances might be beyond your control.

Others might just require you to be careful and plan ahead. But simple overselling mistakes can be avoided with inventory management software.