- Intro
- Adjusted Velocity
- Buffer Stock
- Min/Max Restocking
- Inventory Timeline
- Simultaneous Forecasting
- Forecast Modeling
- Sync to Scale
- IPI Restock Limits
- Purchase Orders
- KPI Dashboards
- Why SoStocked?
Intro
Hey there Amazon sellers, Chelsea Cohen here. Thanks for stopping by to check out our Amazon inventory management software demo.
I’m one of the founders of SoStocked.com. As you probably know, SoStocked is an inventory management, forecasting, and tracking software. What you might not know is that I built SoStocked to scratch my own itch. Well, it was more of a severe headache than a simple itch.
Read MoreI spent five years wrangling spreadsheets and other software that just didn’t work well for an Amazon business. Such a nightmare. Everything was either too cookie-cutter, too time-consuming, or too expensive. Ain’t nobody got time for that!
I dreamed of inventory software that would be built from an Amazon seller's perspective someday. Made by someone who was actually in the Amazon trenches selling day-to-day. Someone who understood the nuances of FBA, warehouses, wholesale, bundling, PAN-EU, seasonality, stock-outs, SOPs, marketing, IPI, etc. These details matter because they create a diverse set of needs among Amazon sellers. Experiencing the Amazon inventory pains (not just theorizing about them) helps to tackle the problem correctly.
One of my experiences was the nightmare moment I realized too late that I was going to stock out (enter nightmares of ridiculously priced air shipments and lost rankings). 🤦♀️ The problem was that I under-ordered because my spreadsheet wasn’t smart enough to factor “stock out days” and forecasted the wrong order amount.
Or how about the time I over-ordered by thousands of units 😱 because the inventory system I was using at the time didn’t accurately account for a “past sales spikes anomaly”? My product had been mentioned on the gifts segment of a morning news show, and that one day of sales threw off the calculation and next year’s order was forecasted incorrectly. There I was, stuck with dead stock. It cost me thousands in extra-storage fees, extra marketing to move the inventory, and tied up capital that could have made money in better products.
The list goes on: over-ordering, under-ordering, ordering late, transferring late, tracking orders/payment, juggling spreadsheets, managing bundles, following up on POs, multiple marketplaces, and costly warehouse recounts, etc. I was tired of stressing and guessing when it came time to forecast orders. I needed a solution that used “good” data and not just “gut” feel—something that could accurately and correctly track, manage, and forecast Amazon inventory.
So I rallied software programmers and 25 top Amazon sellers together to build SoStocked.com. We curated the best of their suggestions, spreadsheets, and systems and then spent 1.5 years turning them into a software that makes inventory management more effortless. A software that is much smarter than a manual spreadsheet, but also more customizable than a cookie-cutter algorithm.
Adjusted Velocity
Use SoStocked to take control of these top 10 Amazon inventory management & forecasting pains: over-ordering, under-ordering, ordering late, transferring late, tracking orders/payment, juggling spreadsheets, managing bundles, following up on POs, multiple marketplaces, and avoiding costly warehouse recounts.
- Apart from verifying whether a stockout has occurred, you can also use SoStocked to look at stockout patterns and identify when your sales are significantly lower than the average. So if your sales are 70% less than the daily average for any one day, that day is going to be flagged as a potential stockout. This helps to catch things such as suspensions; for example, you have inventory in stock at Amazon, but you stopped making sales because your listing was shut down. You can choose to include or exclude each flagged day based on what is most valid and helpful to your business.
- Similarly, you can locate sales spikes (the times when you sold higher than the average) and decide whether to include or exclude them from your forecasting data.
- With the ability to cherry-pick the information you want to exclude from your forecasting, you can easily use your last year's sales data with SoStocked and exclude the periods where you stocked out, so you don’t repeat the same mistakes twice.
- When you exclude a stockout period, SoStocked replaces it with an average of what you should have sold if you had not stocked out.
- You can even use SoStocked for forecasting new launches by overriding with a manual velocity option.
Buffer Stock
Buffer stock, or safety stock, is like a false zero alert that acts as a trigger to tell you to order before you hit a stockout. For example, if your buffer stock is 250 units, you'll be alerted to order so that your inventory arrives before you hit 250 units, NOT before you hit zero.
Set your buffer stocks based on the number of days or number of units. The number of days is preferred, however, as it's going to fluctuate based on your inventory needs for that time period.
Watch The VideoMin/Max Restocking
Min/Max Restocking sets a range for your high and low stock settings which makes it extremely easy to know how much to order and by when. It is an inventory optimization technique used in some of the most streamlined warehouses and is great for VAs.
Just set the minimum and maximum days or units of stock for FBA and your warehouse, and SoStocked will always help you stay within that range.
Watch The VideoInventory Timeline
Inventory Timeline is a game-changer because it helps you to visualize your sales and inventory patterns over time which is vital for planning and inventory strategy."
Watch The VideoSimultaneous Forecasting
Simultaneous forecasting is the forecasting of both supplier orders and warehouse transfers at the same time. If you use a 3PL, you really need to have 2 forecasts going for every SKU at all times, or maybe even a 3rd if you can express ship during emergencies.
With SoStocked, you can have a transfer forecast and an order forecast for each product. Then in cases where you’re running short and need to air ship, you can also get express lead time forecasting to figure out how much stock you need to send by express/air versus regular shipment.
Watch The VideoForecast Modeling
Forecast Modeling refers to combining your past sales history and future marketing plans to create projected sales, testing to avoid future stockouts, and to ensure accurate ordering. This is the core feature of the SoStocked software because it's not just past data that you need to include in your inventory management and your projections, you also need to include your future marketing plans.
There are several tools inside of SoStocked that allow you to add your marketing plans into your inventory planning.
- Future Lightning Deals allows you to project your future inventory needs by setting a date or date range and the total extra number of units that you plan to sell within that time frame. It can also be used for things like email marketing.
- Seasonal Sales Spikes allow you to add a boost to a specific period of time, by just setting the date range, giving the spike a name, and specifying a percentage. You can also add seasonal depressions by just putting the percentage in negative and it will show you the new velocity based on that negative percentage. This feature can be applied to one SKU at a time or across your entire catalog.
- Additional Sales Growth can also be added to an individual SKU or to your entire catalog.
Sync to Scale
Currently, the biggest mistake that Amazon sellers tend to make is marketing without considering the impact on inventory.
“A good marketing plan can turn bad fast when it is so successful that it causes you to stockout.”
That's why putting marketing plans into your inventory planning is extremely important because when you're out of inventory, you're out of business and that can negatively impact your cash flow.
This is where our Sync to Scale philosophy comes in as it allows you to factor in your marketing plans, put them into your inventory planning which then moves along into your cash flows, thereby making it a cohesive machine that allows you to scale a lot faster.
Watch The VideoIPI Restock Limits
In light of the new changes that have gone on with the Inventory Performance Index and any limitations that Amazon might have put on your inventory, we’ve added settings in SoStocked that allow you to use your restock limit as the max limit for sending into Amazon.
Purchase Orders
With SoStocked, you can also create purchase orders and send them directly to your supplier right from within the software. This allows you to easily account for things like what's in production, what's in route, and what’s arriving to your warehouse.
Watch The VideoKPI Dashboards
SoStocked also has a variety of dashboards that tell you what you have, where it's at, where your inbound shipments are, what inventory you have on hand, any future stock outs that might be occurring; and also the ability to filter all of your data, add any columns that you need in each individual report, move these columns around, and save these as individual new dashboards so that every piece of information that you need is simply a few clicks away.
Watch The VideoWhy SoStocked?
When you're looking for an Amazon inventory solution, make sure it fulfills the following criteria:
- Removes sales spikes and stockouts
- Factor in things like Lightning Deals
- Projects seasonality
- Tracks all of your orders and transfers
- Provides reorder alerts
- Manages your FBA, 3PL and on order or inbound inventory all in one place.
SoStocked is really built for these inventory management best practices and incorporates them into one tool that is automated, fully understandable, and fully customizable. It solves all of the inventory management issues that are frequently faced by Amazon sellers and really cuts down the amount of time it takes to handle inventory management. Seriously, if you're an Amazon seller, you need to use SoStocked.com.
Watch The Video