Calming Inventory Chaos for Amazon Sellers

Stocking Out Had To Change

David, like many successful business owners, is driven to succeed. He studies hard, reads the right books, follows the best eCommerce business minds, and has a strong vision for his company’s future. He doesn’t treat his business like a part-time hobby. And like many Amazon sellers, he discovered selling on Amazon and was immediately drawn to the prospect of building his own business from the comfort of his home in California. So that’s what he did. David took the plunge several years ago, and it took him years to build his business across many marketplaces and continents, up to a 7-figure success story.

But success rarely comes without struggle or sacrifice, and David had his fair share of both! Some of the more notable challenges he faced were:

• Getting stuck in small yet demanding tasks when employees did not do their jobs correctly.
• Overly long production and development lead times from suppliers
• Launching products into a saturated market on Amazon
• Other Amazon sellers copying his ideas
• Other sellers lowering their prices and killing the margins
• Amazon’s seemingly never-ending, arbitrary, and haphazard suspensions
• Changing markets leading to a massive increase in sales…leading to stock-outs
• No systematic way to accurately predict and place future inventory orders on time, every time
• Late shipments, missing shipments, etc.

When it came to inventory management, it frustrated David that there were no workable solutions to track his inventory levels, velocities, and forecasts in one easy-to-use system. Like many other sellers, this left David going back to the old spreadsheets and manual velocity calculations that led him into stockout after painful stockout in the past.

In other words, David was doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. Insanity.

David’s frustration level finally hit a fever pitch when he did the math on several expensive air shipments he was forced to make to keep from stocking out, and he saw just how many thousands of dollars he was losing on each one.

Something had to change…right now!

Searching For Inventory Solutions

As fate would have it, David, desperate for a solution, searched the Amazon App Store Marketplace looking for a software that might possibly be up to the task that he hadn’t been able to conquer to date. It was there that up came up SoStocked.

SoStocked was brand new at the time, and very few people knew about it yet. SoStocked was just launching its first beta release to only 25 users. It was almost pure chance that David found SoStocked on the Amazon App Marketplace.

David immediately signed up and scheduled a call with Chelsea Cohen, who is the co-founder of SoStocked and a fellow 7-figure Amazon seller. She and David spoke on the phone, and based on his specific inventory challenges, she offered him a deal of a lifetime. Essentially, join the SoStocked beta program at a low lifetime price, and the SoStocked team would onboard his SoStocked account and get it set up for him. Chelsea would personally teach him how to use the software. Then David would give feedback which the SoStocked team would use to make changes and updates to help grow the software into the best inventory solution in the Amazon ecosystem. David jumped at the opportunity.

Saying Goodbye To Spreadsheets

The SoStocked team worked with David to get his account fully set up. This included:

• Importing all of his Amazon SKUs from all marketplaces
• Importing and setting up his suppliers, warehouses, and freight forwarders
• Setting up his inventory levels at both FBA (fulfillment by Amazon) and his 3PL (3rd party logistics) warehouses
• Mapping out the calculated sales velocities for each product, using a strategic combination of previous sales trends, current market changes, and future marketing plans
• Building a predictive forecast model to accurately predict future sales, including seasonality, sales blasts, stockout days, and more
• Setting up production lead times to accurately predict and track inventory orders
• Creating an express lead time / split-shipment feature for emergency air freight orders, if needed
• And building out an entire in-app purchase order (PO) and work order (WO) system, which would use the forecasts to place orders on time and then track them all the way to Amazon

After the initial setup process, David was off to the races, tracking his inventory accurately for the first time in years.

Software Built By Seller Feedback

As you read in David’s review, one of the significant improvements he saw was predicting seasonal trends that may lead to stockouts way ahead of time. David had previously wasted many tens of thousands of dollars on expensive air shipments to rush inventory into Amazon simply because he had not foreseen an upcoming stockout. Using SoStocked, he could now see these pending stockouts months in advance and plan his shipments and marketing accordingly to avoid them.

Although SoStocked was a vast improvement over the archaic and time-consuming spreadsheet system David had previously depended on, as with every new software, some initial enhancements needed to be made. And David held up his end of the bargain beautifully, giving the SoStocked software team the vital input and feedback they needed to fully build out the tools into what they are today: the gold standard in inventory management for Amazon sellers.

Scaling With Inventory Software

Because of SoStocked, David has increased his Amazon Inventory Performance Index (IPI) score to the high 700s. This allows him to send in more inventory per shipment with larger restock numbers at Amazon fulfillment centers. That means less frequent shipments into Amazon (hello savings!), less hassle, and fewer stockouts, which, of course, means more profit. He reduced his stress and stopped wasting money on expensive air shipments, as he now had his inventory under control.

To date, David has been one of the most helpful SoStocked users, if not the most helpful user. David’s excellent software suggestions were used to evolve SoStocked into what it is today—the most accurate, powerful, and fully customizable Amazon inventory management software.

David has big plans for the future, including continuing to expand into many off-Amazon platforms such as:

• Shopify
• Walmart
• eBay
• And other marketplaces

And SoStocked will be right there with him as it expands its integrations into these new marketplaces.

Now David been able to finally take a step back and look at the bigger picture, including retail, SEO, improved social media presence, and branding. And who knows, maybe someday soon, David will sell his Amazon brand for millions of dollars and start something new. No matter what he decides to do, we know he is a much happier entrepreneur now that he has SoStocked.

Until next time, cheers!