If you are a physical retailer, one of the major components that you have to focus on is how to maintain your inventory, customer records, sales records, and other such things.

As a physical retailer, maintaining your records can help you work more effectively and efficiently. It will benefit your business in numerous ways in the short as well as long run. If you practice retail inventory management, and also customer record management your business will go a long way.

Retail Inventory Management

Firstly, taking the retail inventory management topic, if you practice it religiously, you come to know certain important aspects about your business, some of which are listed below:

• Quantities of each type of product
• Which products sell the most and which the least
• Profit margins of different products
• Approx amount that is needed to be in back stock and storage
• How many products to reorder
• How often does a certain product is needed to be restocked
• When should a product be phased out
• Impact on sale according to changing seasons

How to do retail inventory management efficiently?

• Create A Consolidated Product Database

Adding all your products to a single place with all the information related to them can help you manage things immensely. Scattered product information will leave you in a miserable position, so it is better to have a consolidated product database.

The product database can include the below-listed things:

• Product name
• Brand
• Retail price 
• Expiration date
• Lot number
• Wholesale cost
• On-hand inventory
• Reorder lead time

• Count Your Inventory Accurately On A Regular Basis

Counting on your inventory within specific time periods is a necessary step. It helps you make records of how much product is required at what time. Also, it gives you insights into all the product quantity requirements in general. Counting during the seasonal period adds a greater benefit as it helps you know the seasonal highs and lows of demands. 

Furthermore don’t forget to take into account the shrinkage, damage, defects, and returns to avoid any mistakes. It depends on the extent of your business and especially about how many times you want to update your data by doing regular and accurate stock counts.

• Simplify Reporting By Accumulating Sales And Inventory Data

Trust us on this one, combining the sales data with the inventory one will work wonders for you. If you do this, then you will get a clear picture of which product of your store is turning over fastest and which one is lagging. 

You can use the product data to know when, which, and how much of a product you need to restock. After this, you can determine what kind of offers or discounts you want to apply based on the quantity you restock and also the popularity of a certain product.

• Practice A Purchasing Process

Set aside time to evaluate data and place orders so you don’t fall behind on seasonal patterns or run the danger of running out of stock. With the help of digital systems, you can set up trigger warnings before a product is going to be out of stock.

Remember that there should always be a buffer period between running out of stock and restocking a product. Also, at the time of restocking keep in mind which products are more profitable and popular.

• Never Forget About The Dead Stock Procedure

Dead stock means all the damaged products, wrong deliveries, and leftover seasonal products. All these products just consume more capital and reduce profit. That’s why it is always recommended to not stock up more than necessary and to always coordinate with your vendor so there is no piling up of the dead stock.

You can make a list of all the products that fit into this category and then separate it from the general selling products category. Discard these products on a regular basis so things don’t get messed up. If your suppliers have a return policy, don’t forget to take advantage of it. Furthermore, you can also sell it to different outlets, donate, recycle, or simply dispose of the products.

Customer Record Management

Nowadays just checking up on your retail inventory won’t help you. You have to dig up deep inside the insights of your business to work more efficiently. You must have seen that whenever you like a product and just search about it, you will see ads of it all over the place. This is simply known as serving as per customer needs. 

In this manner only you also must maintain records of your customers so you can serve them accordingly. Here are some of the benefits that you will see by maintaining your customer records:

• Increase in sales
• Differentiate between loyal and regular customer
• Deep knowledge of customer behaviour
• Identifying different customer needs and wants
• Knowing new trends in the market

How to do customer record management efficiently?

We will keep it short and crisp here, so it won’t take much time and also give you the basic knowledge of customer record management.

• Serving As Per Customer Needs

If you have a record of what is the most popular product from your inventory, then you know what to do? Obviously to stock it up always! You must stock up the most selling product from your store.

Also, keep in mind what are the general needs of your customers. Like there are some over-the-counter medicines that sell the most so stock them up. Furthermore, stock up products according to the seasonal demands. Always remember to take out most of your customer records. 

• Customising Offers And Discounts

When you have the data of your customers, you know which customer loves which product. So take that into knowledge and provide them with offers and discounts related to their favorite products.

For example, if a customer orders more baby products that give them customised discounts on diapers. If one person orders elderly medicines, then give them an offer accordingly. In this way, you can impress your customers and retain them.

• Loyalty Points For The Regular/Loyal Customers

With the data collection, you would come to know which customer comes more often to your store and buys products and who is not such a regular one. So if a customer is taking the initiative to visit your store online or offline and buy products, you must also reward them accordingly.

Having a scheme of loyalty points for your regular customers can be a good step. Treating them with loyalty points which they can use in their future purchases is a great idea as in this they will avail some discount and you will retain your local customer.

Now after such detailed long information, you must have come to know about the easy methods that you must incorporate in your business so that you can manage your books more easily. It might be overwhelming for you now but think of it all digitally. You don’t need to manually count on your inventory, don’t have to do the paperwork about the stocks, plus having knowledge about your customers. How amazing it sounds, right? 

You can make all this happen by installing Raseet. Yes, you heard it right. All this can be at your place by just installing Raseet. Raseet sends a digital bill to your customer from where they can visit your online store and shop conveniently from there itself without any hassle. Also, you can get all the insights into your business and consumer behavior which will help your business grow immensely. So let’s get connected and talk more about it. Contact us on https://raseet.com.