Having too much or too little stock can be expensive. If you want to earn a healthy profit, it is important to keep track of your inventory. If any entrepreneur has a large quantity of stock, he will probably have a hard time relocating it and may face problems such as warehouse storage, taxes, depreciation and insurance costs.

Similarly, if an entrepreneur has less stock means that you cannot offer customers the products they want. If orders are increasing dramatically and owners do not have enough stock, then they will be forced to find the last-minute solutions.

If the products are manufactured in less quantity then it can lose valuable customers to competitors because owners are not able to sell the exact product that customers want.

First, we need to know – What is inventory management?

WooCommerce Inventory management is the process where retail and eCommerce store owners can manage their available stock. Management involves the following steps that need to follow :

1. Availability of Stock
2. Cost of Manufacturing
3. Auto-updation of product categories
4. Add-up new category

And so on…

For the management of such stock – WooCommerce provides many numbers of WooCommerce inventory management plugin like TradeGecko, Katana, Zoho inventory management plugins.

If owners can sell goods to customers or vendors, they will know that selling the right products can be difficult and expensive. Successful inventory management helps entrepreneurs to improve customer relationships.

WHY INVENTORY MANAGEMENT IS IMPORTANT?

1. Affordable Cost

With an organized inventory management system, entrepreneurs can monitor their spending and reduce the cost of manufacturing, shipping and so on. Inventory management plugins can build the equivalent atmosphere where entrepreneurs can take control of the cost of a product.

2. Right Business Decisions

Entrepreneurs should unlock the power of real-time data and make better supply-chain decisions about stock volume, pricing, and discontinued items. If they can supply the accurate volume of products then it will help the entrepreneurs to generate high profit.

3. Automatic Purchase System

There are a number of inventory management plugins that provide real-time data to make smart purchasing decisions, record order history, and restore your inventory automatically. If an entrepreneur has complete detail of the products he sold then it is easy for him/her to choose the product that needs to be manufactured.

CONTROL SUPPLY CHAIN SYSTEM

Supply chain management (SCM) is a wide range of activities required to plan, control, and implement the flow of products from raw material for production in an economical way. There are many functions including top-notch planning and execution of the processes required to optimize the flow of materials, information, and capital that broadly include demand planning, sourcing, production, inventory management, and logistics.

It is clear from this definition that inventory management is a component of SCM. Inventory management focuses on a specific area – namely storage, transfer and tracking goods.

Some of the important things that need to control are as follows :

Looping in Inventory Control

Inventory control is one of the important concepts of inventory management. In general, inventory control refers to producing a complete quantity of inventory at an affordable cost. 

For companies with the use of inventory management plugins, he shares his golden rule:

1. The virtual supply of a product needs to match with the actual supply.
2. Inventory transactions must be reliably accurate and timely so that your system always has an accurate picture of your inventory status.

Moving to Warehouse Automation

The final critical inventory management concept, and technical next step, is warehouse automation. The concept involves creating capabilities in the warehouse, whether it is your own or the third-party logistics warehouse you use. The integration piece is especially important because you want data to flow between applications automatically. In fact, data integration is the first step towards automating your warehouse.

“If the data of inventory does not flow in real-time, an entrepreneur can be inaccurate in the item count. Robots can help speed movement, but they can’t take a product that’s not on the shelf – even if the system indicates there should be”.

“Automation in itself does not adequately address these issues”, as the fundamental limitation is actually in understanding and practicing sound inventory management principles.

Top 18 WooCommerce Inventory Management Plugins

There are many inventory management plugins that are used to manage the e-commerce store stock. Take a look at some of the plugins :

1. TradeGecko
2. Katana
3. Zoho
4. Orderhive Inventory Management
5. Veeqo WooCommerce Order and Inventory Plugin
6. WooCommerce Rapid Stock Manager
7. eSwap
8. DEAR Inventory
9. Smart Manager
10. Ecomdash
11. WooCommerce Product Stock Manager
12. WooCommerce POS Inventory Management
13. Atum Inventory Management for WooCommerce
14. WordPress Inventory Management WooCommerce
15. WooCommerce Stock Inventory Management
16. Stock Synchronization for WooCommerce
17. Stitch
18. WooCommerce Out of Stock Manager