Summer is the perfect time for retailers to clear out old inventory to make room for new merchandise in time for the Christmas season.
But how can you best determine what items in inventory should be marked down now so that summer shoppers looking for bargains will come to your retail business to buy?
This is when a solid inventory management system can very likely provide you with a better forecast for sales and profits than the Weather Channel can in predicting summer weather. When was the last time you were caught in an unexpected thunderstorm?
Your small business should already have in place an inventory management system that provides specialized audit and verification services. It’s the best way to monitor inventory movement to help determine what items are bringing in profits.
For example, a good inventory service will provide a retail inventory report that includes a month-to-month percentage comparison of all items in stock. Such a report helps track what items are selling well. Summer shoppers would certainly grab popular items if on sale.
And, of course, shoppers are sharp. It would be pretty embarrassing, not to mention bad publicity for your business, if your pre-sale and sale pricing is inaccurate. Shoppers can be unforgiving if they think they’ve been duped.
Don’t let pricing mistakes happen in the first place. You should have in place an inventory management system that also provides you with price verification services to accurately identify incorrectly priced items. This service will locate, tag and re-label mispriced items in stock for you.
If you don’t have an inventory management system now, get one. Then, by next year, your “Christmas in July” sale event could rein in bigger profits, like buckets of rain from the summer sky.