Stock is what fuels a company: it drives sales and helps ensure success. Yet poor management of this kind of fuel can have terrible consequences on your e-commerce activity, especially if (a large) part of your turnover comes from marketplaces. This is why it is so urgent to include the notion of stock control into your supply chain management.
Good stock management helps ensure the right amount of stock is available in the right place at the right time. Stock control is thus a process aiming to ensure relevant stock levels are kept at all times - to meet real-time requests whilst limiting your supply chain expenses as much as possible. This is truly a prerequisite for boosting marketplace sales - even more so if you work with a large number of marketplaces.
Stock control challenges in a context of growing marketplaces
Indeed, presence on marketplaces tends to make stock management more complicated, given the growing need for coordination between the various sales channels and product flows.
When you only sell through your own website, it is easier to assess your stock levels at all times, and therefore know to what extent you are able to meet upcoming requests. Conversely, when juggling with several virtual points of sale, stock management can become a real challenge: you need to be able to potentially manage several requests at the same time, synchronise stock levels according to what has already been sold, reintegrate products returned by buyers, take deliveries (and returns) that go through pick-up points into account, etc.
There are lots of questions to be asked at any given time:
Do you have enough stock?
Have you scheduled stock input to balance out what has been sold?
Have you coordinated your various product flows so stock levels are updated automatically?
Is there a risk of excess stock (leading to additional expenses)?
A stock control solution helps turn the constraint of stock management into a real opportunity. This kind of tool optimises stock control, simultaneously updates product sheets within the various marketplaces, and reduces any risk of management errors. On top of this, sales are 100% controlled within the marketplaces!
