How to Fix Your Amazon FBA Inventory Management Process

The Amazon FBA program simplifies many aspects of eCommerce supply chain management. Streamlined delivery, product warehousing, and return processing are just a few of the conveniences.

Despite the many advantages of fulfilling some or all of your orders through FBA, you still need a strategic Amazon inventory management process. Otherwise, bottlenecks are likely to develop, which can erode profitability.

In this post, we'll discuss common FBA inventory management bottlenecks - and how to use our RestockPro tool to correct them.

Bottleneck: Restocking Miscues

You can't sell what you don't have. And without the right restocking workflow, that's exactly the situation you'll find yourself in. Customers want to buy from you, but this can only happen if you've carefully restocked each product at precisely the right moment.

Create a more manageable restocking process by ensuring that you have the data you need to make fast and effective restocking decisions. You can improve your Amazon inventory management process by using software like RestockPro to keep track of every detail you need to consider when ordering and shipping inventory.

Unlike spreadsheets, which are outdated the moment you create them, RestockPro pulls in actual quantity-on-hand data from FBA locations.

RestockPro also tracks inventory that you've recently shipped to FBA warehouses, calculating a total inventory number for each SKU. This information is used to prioritize your most urgent restocking actions. RestockPro then "flags" them accordingly, helping you keep track of inventory management tasks at a glance. Red flags require immediate attention, while yellow flags will soon become priorities.

Too busy to resolve restocking issues now? No problem, as RestockPro will keep things flagged until you have time to work through the list. From the convenient dashboard, you can quickly toggle between views that return pre-filtered lists of restocking suggestions. Want to see which restocking suggestions are more than a week past due? Simply click the red "alerts >7 days" widget from your RestockPro homepage.

Unlike clicking through endless lists of SKUs, RestockPro presents the exact information you need to run your FBA business effectively.

Bottleneck: Inefficient Shipment Prep

In theory, shipping to FBA warehouses should be significantly easier than sending individual parcels to consumers. Oh, if it were only that easy!

For each new shipment, FBA merchants have a number of steps to coordinate:

• Creating purchase orders for suppliers
• Gathering and sorting local inventory
• Preparing FBA documentation
• Printing stickers or other prep work required by Amazon
• Documenting and uploading box contents
• Preparing boxes with shipping labels
• Tracking shipment status
• Ensuring that Amazon properly accounts for received inventory

If done manually across your entire product catalog, these activities could require an entire back-office support staff. As an alternative, many sellers use a tool like RestockPro to do the heavy lifting. RestockPro allows you to prepare inbound shipments for Seller Central with just a few clicks. 

Better yet, you can get real-time updates on FBA inbound shipments. If an issue arises, simply make note of any follow-up work that needs to happen.

Bottleneck: Purchase Order Disorganization

An email here, a PDF there. For many Amazon sellers, purchase order management can be a serious pain point. That's especially true when suppliers make a mistake or pass along unexpected fees. Purchase orders (POs) are a contractual agreement between you and your vendors, which makes them even more important to your business.

By managing your POs with RestockPro, you're able to create organization for an often disorganized eCommerce function.

In addition, since RestockPro-generated POs are natively digital, our system actually uses the cost data in its profitability calculations. Instead of exporting cost data from your accounting software or manually keying in data from paper records, RestockPro keeps track of everything for you. For merchants processing hundreds or thousands of orders, this simple feature could save countless hours of labor over a twelve-month period.

Fix Your Amazon Inventory Management Process with RestockPro

Making the decision to automate your Amazon FBA inventory management process is not one to take lightly. Our RestockPro team is here to make your transition as easy as possible. Sign up for a risk-free trial of our software, and one of our RestockPro experts will reach out and help set things up.

At eComEngine, our goal is to help you succeed as an FBA seller. We look forward to delivering on that promise through our RestockPro tool.