How Inventory Alerts Improve Efficiency and Performance

Inventory alerts are an essential component of effective inventory management. Low stock alerts can be the difference between whether your business fulfills an order. Mismanaged inventory can lead to issues like inconsistent stock levels, fulfillment delays or miscommunication between warehouses.

Protecting your company from poor inventory management is crucial, especially for businesses with a multichannel approach to sales and multiple stores. Relying on employees to monitor inventory levels and react to changes manually can result in errors and increase risk.

Fortunately, for a growing e-commerce business, inventory alerts, or stock alerts, can boost efficiency and performance. 

Benefits of Inventory Alerts

Stock alerts can help you manage multiple store locations and offline and online channels to ensure each location has enough inventory to meet demand. If your business uses just-in-time (JIT) inventory, these alerts are even more essential.

The advantages of inventory alerts include:

1. Drive sales: You can use inventory alerts as a marketing strategy to drive sales in-store and online. For example, you can have visitors sign up for inventory alerts. This will allow them to know when an item is back in stock and available for purchase. You can also use this tactic in your store by promoting low-inventory items. Because shoppers respond to scarcity, you can use these items to encourage impulse purchases.
2. Maintain control over operations: With inventory alerts, you can maintain control over your company’s operations. An automated system and fewer last-minute orders can lead to seamless operations and help you effectively manage inventory. Inventory alerts can allow you to set higher thresholds for the fastest-selling and most popular items.
3. Remain organized in a busy selling period: During a seasonal surge, your business may experience a greater volume of orders. Though this can be great news for your company’s profitability, there can also be logistical challenges, such as higher volume, unpredictable demand and temporary employees. Inventory alerts can enable inventory tracking and keep you updated on inventory fluctuations.
4. Determine when to lower or increase prices: An inventory alert for low stock can indicate it’s time to increase the item’s price. Similarly, inventory alerts for aging inventory can indicate when to lower the price or run a promotional discount. If you own a luxury business, for example, you may want to use inventory alerts to prevent overexposure and give your customers small windows of opportunity to purchase new products with limited inventory.

Inventory alerts help your business stay up-to-date on inventory and develop more profitable pricing and marketing tactics. Businesses with automated inventory alerts can also reduce stock waste and optimize inventory levels.

Types of Inventory Alerts

Stock alerts inform you about a change in your inventory level. There are a few types of inventory alerts:

• Low stock alerts: With a low stock alert, you’ll be notified when the inventory of an item is getting low. Use a higher quantity for this alert. If you’re notified when there’s only one item left in stock, you may still run out of stock unless you pay for rush shipping for a new order.
• Slow-moving stock alerts: If stock is slow-moving, you can get an alert.
• New shipment alerts: You can also opt to receive an alert for new shipments.
• Inventory reorder point alerts: This alert will notify you when you need to reorder inventory.
• Large or bulk order alerts: When your business receives a large order, you’ll be notified. If you find you’re reordering frequently and the costs are growing expensive, try to negotiate a better price from your supplier for bulk orders. Many suppliers also offer discounts for these orders, which can help boost your margins and increase profits.

The inventory alerts your business should utilize depend on your business, product and retail operations. An inventory management system should include an inventory alert feature that sends a notification to an individual or group when an item meets an alert’s parameters. These alerts can be delivered as push notifications or emails.

How Inventory Alerts Improve Efficiency and Performance

Businesses that use manual processes like spreadsheets to track inventory or don’t track inventory at all are more likely to face errors in operations. Inventory alerts can help your business increase profitability, efficiently use storage and warehouse space and reduce missed sales or holding costs. With inventory alerts and an inventory management system, you can instantly review what inventory you have, where the items are located and how much of each item you have.

1. Track your inventory: Tracking only part of your inventory can impact your organization’s performance. Fortunately, tracking your inventory and accounting for every item becomes a more manageable task when you implement inventory alerts. You want to account for the items you sell customers along with your supplies, raw materials and parts.
2. Keep control of the supply network: An inventory stockout is an expensive problem, so it’s essential for any business to avoid an out-of-stock situation. With inventory alerts, you can avoid this by staying up-to-date on your stock levels and in control of your organization’s supply network.
3. Minimize errors in stock-keeping: Since you’ll no longer have to track inventory by hand or in a spreadsheet, you can minimize errors made due to these manual processes.
4. Respond promptly to fluctuations in demand: In today’s highly competitive market, you business needs to be able to pivot at a moment’s notice and respond to demand volatility instantly. Stock alerts provide you with a reliable view of your item’s performance in real time. If you’re frequently getting low stock alerts for an item, this can indicate that your marketing tactics are effective and demand is rising.

Learn More About Finale Inventory Today

Finale Inventory is a lightning-fast, scalable and highly adaptable inventory management system for growing e-commerce businesses with multichannel warehouses to manage. Collaborating with thousands of customers, we know every inventory management application is unique. Our domain experts will partner with you to craft a solution that meets your specific business needs.

Finale Inventory is a software as a service (SaaS). Our system integrates with marketplace listings from websites to simplify inventory organization and accounting with tools like barcode management. Contact us at Finale Inventory to learn more about effective inventory management and product alerts today.