Everyone starts with a small business, but over time you want it to grow and flourish. Growth comes in many forms, from an increasing customer base, growing stock and inventory, new brick-and-mortar stores and more international accessibility for online stores. Of course, a strong business ethic is also an essential part of fostering growth in your company, but you still have to embrace useful technological tools.
One tool that is becoming more and more widely used among small to medium business owners is the Magento Inventory Management system. This warehouse management system is gaining popularity for sure, but what exactly is it, and how does it work to grow your business? We’ll run through these questions and more so you can ensure you’re making the best possible decision on inventory management tools and software for your unique business.
What is Magento Inventory Management?
Magento is an e-commerce platform that supports online stores for businesses. It is also an extension that you can add to other platforms to help you manage an already existing online store, both on the platform and behind the scenes with stock and inventory management. This software extension has a far reach for managing a whole business online and offline and is especially useful for improving customer experience.
Of course, when customers are happy, it’s only a matter of time before their satisfaction with you and your business translates to some serious growth. Next, we’ll check out just how you can utilize Magento Inventory Management to get things moving and poise your business for major growth.
10 Ways to Utilize Inventory Management for Business Growth
1. Integrate With Other Extensions
Magento’s own basic inventory features are not always enough for growing businesses. You’ll need something that has the ability to grow with you over time, accommodating all the changes your business will go through.
Magento attempts to make up for this problem by integrating with other extensions so that you get Magento’s features and more. When looking through integrations and finding what to work with, ensure that these extra extensions have the features you need.
Evaluate your current business needs and ask yourself the following questions to choose what extensions to add to your Magento management system:
- Do I need low inventory notifications?
- Can this extension integrate with drop shippers?
- Did this extension get good reviews from real customers?
2. Inventory Updates in Real-Time
Magento offers you real-time inventory updates, so you always know how much of your products are in stock at all times. This is especially useful for communing with customers. You can avoid pitfalls like promising products that are out of stock and long waits for deliveries due to incorrect stock levels. A ballpark idea of how much inventory you have at a given time may be helpful, but you can still run into some serious problems if your estimate is ever wrong. With real-time updates, you’re always in the know.
3. Dropshipping
Dropshipping is a valuable process that allows you to offload order fulfillment to your supplier instead of keeping the stock yourself in a warehouse, cutting down on some high costs while also effectively cutting out the middleman of warehouse inventory. You save money, your products are safe, and your customers get their goods on time, upping their satisfaction and loyalty to your business. This process may sound simple, but it can make a big difference. Of course, dropshipping is not unique to Magento, but it certainly earns the system a point.
4. Endless Aisle Use
Real-time inventory updates and drop shipping can come together for something known as an endless aisle, in which your products and inventory never run out. While this may sound impossible and even a little magical, it comes from a perfect storm of tools working together.
With a combination of streamlined dropshipping with your supplier and real-time updates, your products are always automatically ordered when they get low or are out of stock. With orders happening so quickly, you always have stock coming in, which means your customer always gets their product without knowing any of the background work. In short, you create your own endless aisle.
5. Centralized Inventory Management
Remember how we mentioned that Magento’s inventory was a little too basic for a growing business? This drawback comes back around with the idea of centralizing your inventory data. If you have a single small e-commerce or physical retail store, Magento’s centralized inventory may work for you.
While you want your inventory data to be in one place so that it’s easily accessible, you also might want to access your data from multiple locations. It’s centralized but in a very different way. Some data should be in your point-of-sale (POS) system and other channels you may have, like Amazon and eBay, where you sell. Proper inventory management should handle this and more, so keep that in mind as you choose your system.
6. Warehouse Management
Multi-location inventory management is essential for a growing business, as you may soon have multiple warehouses to house your increasing inventory. Warehouse management means that you can split your inventory depending on store locations, products, and websites. Keeping things organized and easily accessible no matter where orders and needs are coming from will help your business grow.
7. Custom Inventory Attributes
Magento allows you to set custom inventory attributes for all your products. This feature also offers pre-defined inventory values by default, which means you’ll need to change them manually if you want to set your custom values for every product. It’s tedious, yes, but it can be beneficial in the long run.
8. Attribute Updates
For some inventory attributes, you can do mass attribute updates, which allow you to update certain inventory parameters like minimum and maximum quantity in a shopping cart and backorders at once. This remedies the need for manual custom changes for some aspects, which can be perfect for smaller businesses that have smaller inventories to wrangle.
9. Low-stock Inventory Tracking
When different products in your inventory begin to drop in stock, this feature will alert you so that you can order more and help ensure increased stability. When you have items that sell out quickly, you can keep an eye on them so that your customers never have to worry about getting the “sold out” message. When you track low-stock inventory across all your warehouses, you can really stay on top of your inventory and please customers.
10. Price Management
Finally, Magento can help with price management for your products. Usually, knowing how much to price your items can be tricky. You have to look at the market at large, view supply and demand trends, and see what your competitors are doing. All this can become hard to keep track of, which is where Magento comes in. With this feature, you can remove some of the headaches of competition.
How Finale Inventory Boosts Magento’s Inventory Management Benefits
As shown, Magento comes with many advantages on its own for inventory management for small businesses. However, if you want your business to grow at all, Magento needs an extra boost. With this in mind, you might want to consider what Finale offers regarding inventory management software tools and features to help you get the most out of Magento’s inventory management software.
Like Magento, Finale Inventory offers plenty of solutions. From integrations and warehouse management to valuable tools and practices like barcode scanners, powerful reporting engines, inventory control, dropshipping, centralized inventory, and inventory tracking in a cloud-based management software. It’s all about solutions to help make your business run smoothly and keep your inventory well managed and up to date.
Finale has two configurations to manage your inventory from the Magento warehouse management system and supports versions 1.9, 2.x and 3.x of Magento. You can either directly connect your Magento stores with Finale, where we’ll make the proper stock adjustments. Your Magento listings will also update with any quantity changes. Many e-commerce businesses also use ShipStation as an additional order management solution. Finale uses ShipStation’s API to directly communicate with ShipStation to manage your inventory and automatically update your stock levels with Magento.
Your e-commerce business will experience a host of benefits from using Finale Inventory with the Magento warehouse system for effective inventory control, including:
- Automatic stock updates and status changes: Finale manages your Magento store’s customer orders by keeping track of and automatically updating stock levels across all your online channels, including your Magento store. If you’re using ShipStation with Finale, Finale will change the status of back-ordered products from on hold to waiting once they arrive at your warehouse.
- Quick integration: Integrating your Magento store with Finale is simple, only taking seconds. Finale will work with your preexisting ShipStation and Magento configurations and will immediately synch orders so Finale can manage your inventory.
- Stock-keeping unit (SKU) tracking: You might have to use different SKUs for the same product if you use multiple e-commerce marketplaces to sell products. Finale eliminates the need to manage product SKUs with spreadsheets by effectively keeping track of your inventory.
- High transaction volumes: If your business requires an order management solution that can keep track of a large volume of transactions, Finale has you covered. We support up to 50,000 transactions per month and are striving to support even more transactions in the future.
- Multiple shipping locations and marketplaces: Finale allows you to manage inventory in multiple warehouse locations. Our Magento order management solution will also manage your inventory across all e-commerce marketplaces ShipStation supports. Additionally, we automatically support all new marketplaces ShipStation adopts.
- Product kitting: Magento’s inventory control services help you kit or bundle your existing products to give your business more selling options.
- Efficient restocking: Create thresholds for product counts to avoid stockouts. Finale automatically calculates dynamic reorder points based on your supplier lead time, safety stock, and expected company growth to help with restock forecasting. We’ll send you a low-inventory notification, and Finale will automatically update stock quantities across all platforms and marketplaces.
Unlike Magento, Finale does not come with the same issues of insufficient space, manual data entry, or simple functions. On its own, Finale is a high-tech software option that offers you advanced tools and features, all for an amazing price.
You’ll never have to worry about running out of space, paying hefty fees for simple upgrades, or having to input or customize certain data manually with Finale. The software is smooth, the functions are seamless, and you can access everything you need to from all your devices. Magento may work for some, but if you want all the advantages of Magento plus more, and none of the drawbacks, Finale is the best choice.
Finale Inventory Management: The Best Choice
In short, Finale Inventory is a company with growth in mind, which is why they offer all of Magento’s features plus more. You can start your free trial today and see how well Finale manages your business needs and fosters growth for the near future.
