Inventory Challenges Archives – unicommerce.com

The Challenges of Multichannel Inventory Management and How Can D2C Brands Overcome Them in 2023

Team Unicommerce — Thu, 14 Dec 2023 07:56:56 +0000

Today, there are a lot of new technologies that are bringing about a paradigm shift in the way retailers are able to sell their products. To catch more eyeballs, retailers are trying to tap their customers on every available sales channel. The increased demand has resulted in the rise of many start-up brands moving their business from just selling on marketplaces to a mix of marketplaces and D2C websites.

But managing a vast inventory and several SKUs across multiple sales channels makes it challenging for retailers to thrive in this cut-throat competitive market. The answer is to embrace advanced technologies to get ahead in the market, here is when a robust inventory management system comes in handy.

Challenge #1: Limited or Poor Inventory Visibility

Many retailers struggle with the problem of limited or poor inventory visibility across multiple sales channels. Therefore, it becomes increasingly challenging for them to manage, control, and optimize business operations, leading to delayed shipments and lost sales.

You can simplify multichannel selling with a real-time inventory management system. The features offered by these systems not only enhance stock visibility but also reduce inventory loss. For example, with the Item-level traceability feature, businesses have the ability to track each item of every product throughout the life cycle.

Read: How Multi-Brand Car Service Company Attained 9X Sales Growth with Inventory Management operations

Challenge #2: Inefficient Expiry Management

As more retailers try to bring their business across multiple sales channels, the challenge is maintaining operational efficiency across these different channels. With changing demand, it is important to efficiently manage products that get close to expiry. Industries dealing with low-shelf life products like FMCG, Pharma, Beauty & Personal care, etc., need efficient expiry management and rotation methods to minimize the number of expired products piling up on their shelves.

Using FIFO (First In, First Out) and FEFO (First Expire, First Out) based picking and batching helps businesses reduce obsolete inventory by selling items based on the current status of their shelf life. This helps ensure high-quality products to customers, thus increasing their satisfaction.

Read: How can you Minimize Stock Losses for your business by using FIFO & FEFO?

Challenge #3: Manual Inventory Update

To stay ahead of the competition, businesses need to keep their inventory updated across multiple sales channels. Managing huge inventory with manual procedures is prone to more errors and leads to slower order processing. If a brand sells on three sales channels, it needs to track inventory across all three sales channels, manually inputting product information into each platform. This is a time-intensive process.

Updating inventory becomes much easier and more efficient with software. Using inventory management software makes it easy for businesses to monitor huge stocks, therefore, improving order fulfillment and accuracy across multiple channels.

Read: How Hamilton Housewares attained 99% Order Fulfillment Rate?

Challenge #4: Frequent Stockouts

The last thing any e-commerce business wants is to run out of stock when the demand for its product is high. Managing optimum inventory across multiple channels can be a real challenge for your business. To avoid stockouts, it is important to calculate the right amount of product units (SKUs) needed in stock at any given time.

With an automated inventory management system, you can easily eliminate imbalances and errors in stocks. These highly-advanced systems allow retailers to set a minimum limit. If the stock goes below the limit, it automatically adds products to respective vendor panels for processing. The comprehensive reports by inventory management software also provide businesses with data that allow them to know the highest and lowest-selling SKUs and analyze trends over time.

This data can also be leveraged during sales and the festive season to make well-informed strategic decisions. These self-regulating operations prevent unnecessary stockouts and manage seamless sales across multiple channels.

Read: How Unicommerce Empowered Vastramay to Manage their Inventory Seamlessly

Challenge #5: Inventory Discrepancies

Tracking inventory across multiple channels may seem a straightforward task, but since the inventory process is always on the go, it’s not uncommon for inventory to get misplaced, lost, or stolen. This leads to a loss in revenue and harms your business’s bottom line.

With the cycle counting feature, retailers can accurately analyze the physically recorded data and map inventories correctly. Not only does this help identify inventory issues, but it also provides reasons and suitable corrective actions to overcome these challenges.

Read: Why Choose Cycle Count Over Physical Counts?

Key Takeaways!

Businesses with multi-channel inventory management are better equipped to meet the changing demands of customers. Unicommerce’s robust Inventory Management System can help overcome these inventory challenges and streamline the order fulfillment process for your business!

Related read –

Discover Unicommerce’s Success Story with Leading Brands –

The post The Challenges of Multichannel Inventory Management and How Can D2C Brands Overcome Them in 2023 appeared first on unicommerce.com.

Order, Inventory, and Logistics Management in the UAE – Challenges & Solutions

Team Unicommerce — Mon, 28 Nov 2022 00:00:09 +0000

The e-commerce industry is booming in the United Arab Emirates. While the growing young tech-savvy cohorts of the UAE could be one of the reasons for this transformation, the overall market design has evolved to incorporate the existence of digitalization. Right from the growing consumption of e-commerce marketplaces to merchants from across borders coming to claim their digital property, the whole market scenario in the UAE seems to be taking a shift with e-commerce coming into play.

From establishing multiple touchpoints across channels to retaining loyal customers to evolving marketing strategies, you have a lot of opportunities lying at your fingertips.

Are you a budding entrepreneur thinking about starting an e-commerce business in the UAE? Or maybe you have an established brick and mortar, but you are finding issues synchronizing your orders and inventory. Or maybe you do have a great online presence, but your operational costs are hampering your ability to grow your bottom line. Well, the answer is to integrate your order, inventory, and logistics in such a way that you not only speed up the inventory turnaround but also synchronize your efforts.

But before that let’s first focus on the current market opportunities and understand the untapped potential for e-commerce businesses in the market!

1. Growing Opportunities for E-commerce Players in the UAE

In the current scenario, the GCC region includes the largest e-commerce penetration rates globally. Not only consumers highly dependent on the upcoming technology systems, but businesses are also leveraging them to build their retail capabilities.

Coming over to the marketplace platforms in the region. Now, that’s something you, as a seller, can’t afford to miss. Amazon.ae has become the biggest player in the UAE market, followed by Namshi.com and Noon.com. While Amazon has been the greatest e-commerce platform in the area, there are still others that you can definitely leverage, especially if you are a startup and are looking for niche consumers.

As we talk about e-commerce, it would be wrong to leave the logistics as achieving operational excellence is the goal of each e-commerce business. While enhancing the logistics and supply chain management capabilities could be the main focus of the businesses in the region, the new and improved technological methods, such as GPS-driven solutions, RFID tracking, and 3D printing, could be leveraged to support growth and scale business. Moreover, the emergence of shipping providers has empowered SMEs.

Now, the question is how can you actually make the most of these lying opportunities?

Well, it’s understandable that working in sync and optimizing operations has to be the top priority, but what are the actual challenges that work as a roadblock in your e-commerce journey, especially when you are operating in the UAE? Have you ever thought about that? Let’s understand!

Growing Opportunities for E-commerce Players in the UAE

2. Challenges associated with Order, Inventory and Logistics in the UAE –

We have seen that e-commerce is growing at an explosive pace in the United Arab Emirates, and people are shifting to online channels, but there are still some challenges that e-commerce businesses face even today. But, first of all, you need to understand that inventory, order, and logistics are correlated to each other. Even if you have mastered any one of these, you won’t be able to amplify business profits because the process will remain incomplete.

Imagine that you have adopted an automated e-commerce inventory management system to get more control & visibility over your inventory. But you are still not able to fulfill orders on time. What could be the reasons?

Maybe your outbound workflow is not strong enough. Or maybe you are not able to assign your orders to shipping providers efficiently. Manual errors could be one of the common problems that companies witness without proper implementation of inventory, order, and logistics systems.

Some of the challenges that you are bound to encounter without a proper inventory, order, and logistics system are:

1. Inventory Management Challenges in the UAE

Businesses in the UAE are experiencing e-commerce inventory management challenges such as keeping the real-time inventory count and maintaining fast stock replenishment. One of the main reasons for the inventory challenges is the obsolete and poor infrastructure of warehouses that are not competent to house the inventory in a systematic way. Moreover, the value chains are complicated in nature and also hinder the growth of e-commerce businesses. Some of the main inventory management problems that people in the UAE face are:

Unable to keep up with the real-time inventory count
Hard to maintain the fast stock replenishment
Difficulty in locating the inventory in the warehouse due to limited visibility
Problems in consolidation & sorting of inventory due to obsolete warehouse infrastructure
Witnessing the situations of stockouts amid peak season
Difficulty in managing the marketplace orders due to poor sync between inventory and online orders

2. Multichannel Order Management Challenges in the UAE

One of the biggest problems in the UAE region is that bulk orders are difficult to route and fulfill. For example; you deal in the online business of fragrances and home aromas. Amid Eid al-Fitr, you come across bulk orders of Oudh. But due to the poor logistics capabilities, you are not able to fulfill them. In the order management process, this kind of problem is generally faced by businesses. Moreover, handling order returns is yet another issue that e-commerce brands face. Right from assigning the delivery partner for the returns, to hastening the overall process, there are a lot of aspects in reverse logistics that businesses need to gain control of. Some of the main order management challenges that people in the UAE face are:

Hard to pick & pack optimization of SKUs at the order level
Difficulty in fulfilling orders faster amid the seasonal demands
Controlling the quality of the products to avoid delivery of damaged products
Challenges in aligning the returns management process

3. Logistics Management Challenges in the UAE

The countries in the UAE have the biggest disadvantage of postal codes over any other country. Many countries in the region don’t have postal codes or mail courier systems, which in turn creates a cluster in the minds of the businesses as to what orders need to be delivered in which region. For example, in Dubai, there are no street addresses for retailers to deliver the products, which makes it difficult for them to fulfill the demands of their customers on time. Moreover, e-tailers face difficulties in picking up products from SMEs as they are not much aware of e-commerce and are aligned to rather sell products to physical retail stores. Some of the main logistics management challenges that people in the UAE face are:

Difficulty in tracking the order from the fulfillment center to the final destination
Delay in delivering products due to the lack of postal codes
Hard to assign deliveries to various shipping providers on the basis of the nature of the order
Inability to integrate various fulfillment centers & warehouses due to lack of full-stack supply chain solution

3. How Can You Overcome the Challenges in the UAE? Curated E-commerce Management Solutions to Overcome These Problems

In the digital age of technology, it has become increasingly important for you to opt for a technology that can manage and handle your operations with utmost ease. Right from maintaining the track of the inventory to automating the order updates to integrating with the leading logistics players, you can perform an array of tasks.

Overcome the Challenges in the UAE

Let’s hop on and understand the processes and steps to solve the operational challenges in order, inventory and logistics management.

1. Inventory Management Solutions in the UAE

Be it centralizing inventory to analyze the inventory levels and stockouts, or updating the inventory from offline, online, and warehouse in real-time, a centralized Inventory Management System – like Unicommerce – will empower you to understand the depth of multichannel and omnichannel retail. Moreover, with inventory management software you will be able to:

Assess and update on virtual, and actual stock across multiple sales channels in real-time
Integrate offline and online inventory seamlessly that eventually gives omnichannel experience to customers
Monitor stock movements in order to build a steady stock pipeline and disbursement across all the sales platforms
Synchronize stock automatically in order to ensure accurate stock visibility that eventually improves sales and controls order cancellations
Rotate stock to address multichannel challenges, such as loss of freshness in the stock, old stock, damage, holding the cost of dead or unmoving stock

2. Order Management Solutions in the UAE

An intelligently deployed multichannel sales tactic doubles up the sales volume with the addition of an order management system. The order fulfillment software enables quick order processing even during the situations – products of mixed prices, and varied nature of orders (fragile/inflammable/expensive).

If you are planning to employ a multichannel order management system, you should opt for a solution like Unicommerce, which ensures a 100% fulfillment rate!

The following are the features that a scalable order management system enables:

Handle bulk orders; right from the order creation in various internal systems and marketplaces to invoice and label printing and shipping arrangement
Handle unified orders across all the sales channels to process orders faster while saving your time and resources so that you can focus on your business expansion
Ensure brand loyalty and grow repeat customers base across multiple touchpoints
Reduce time in the processing of orders, thereby hastening the reverse logistics process

Apart from that, you should also utilize services such as multi-fulfillment centers (MFC) that are designed and curated to cater to the needs of your customers!

3. Logistics Management Solutions in the UAE

Being one of the crucial tasks in the process of operations management, logistics not only helps you fulfill orders faster, but you can also enhance the customers’ experience with improved delivery services. To manage logistics in the UAE, you need the following listed logistics management solutions:

Outsource experienced logistics professionals to ensure fast and efficient delivery of orders
Employ local delivery agents who are familiar with the city’s nooks & crannies so that they can deliver seamlessly in the absence of postal codes

Leverage marketplace platforms such as noon.com, which has invented a geotagging system that captures the location of the customer automatically

Join hands with full-stack eCommerce enablement platforms like Unicommerce as they provide logistics integrations with world-class last-mile delivery platforms in the UAE.

While the e-commerce industry in the UAE is on the brink of a massive shift due to changing consumer preferences, it’s imperative for you as a seller to understand the upcoming challenges & their solutions. Why? Because your operations are the fundamental of your business, and if you brace yourself against all the challenges then you will surely be able to accelerate your business growth, and who ain’t looking for that?