For most online sellers, two of the areas most ripe for improvement are inventory management and fulfillment practices. Devoting attention to these aspects of your eCommerce business can lead to substantial boosts to both your productivity and your bottom line. What’s more, Sellercloud makes it possible for Walmart Marketplace sellers to do exactly that.
Who is Sellercloud?
Sellercloud provides merchants with a unified, omnichannel software platform and patented, feature-rich technology designed specifically to empower businesses of all sizes in today’s competitive eCommerce landscape. Sellercloud’s fully-featured API integrations with Walmart Marketplace, WFS, and Walmart DSV give sellers a pathway to reach and sell to one of the world’s largest online customer bases.
3 Ways to Boost the Efficiency of Your Inventory and Fulfillment Workflows
In the competitive world of eCommerce, every optimization matters. With the right tools and workflows, sellers can gain a competitive edge that makes it possible to increase profitability and scale their businesses. For Walmart Marketplace sellers, prioritizing reliable and efficient inventory management and order fulfillment practices are essential pieces of the puzzle when it comes to converting sales, improving customer satisfaction, and attracting repeat business.
These 3 optimizations, in particular, can create an immediate positive impact on your effectiveness as a Walmart Marketplace seller:
1 Be Proactive About Your Inventory Needs
Out-of-stocks, backorders, and overselling are some of the most painful mistakes in eCommerce. Having to regularly delay or cancel customer orders due to a lack of inventory will not only lead to disappointed customers, but it can lead to account suspensions or terminations for violating Walmart Marketplace’s Seller Performance Standards. The solution, simply put, is to make sure that you always have the stock you need to keep pace with customer demand. To do so, there are several steps you can take to set and maintain sufficient inventory levels to fulfill every order you receive.
It begins with establishing the ideal buffer inventory and stock levels for each SKU you sell. How much inventory do you need to keep on hand to satisfy your projected sales? How much excess stock do you need to carry to comfortably account for seasonal and/or unexpected order spikes? With these figures in mind, Sellercloud allows you to set a per-product “safety quantity” that serves as a stock buffer against overselling. This “safety quantity” is subtracted from the actual quantity of a product you have on hand before that information is pushed out to the channels where you sell, including Walmart Marketplace.
For instance, if a seller has 500 units on hand and a safety quantity buffer set to 50 units, Sellercloud will report to Walmart Marketplace that there are only 450 units available for sale. This 50-unit buffer can be used to satisfy unexpected order surges or protect against supply chain delays. These buffers can also be used in tandem with another helpful feature, Predictive Purchasing, to ensure that you always have enough stock to meet customer demand. Predictive Purchasing is an automated support feature in Sellercloud that allows sellers to be notified when inventory levels fall below a certain threshold and it’s time to reorder. Purchase orders (POs) can be generated and sent to suppliers to guarantee that the right amount of inventory is ordered and that it will arrive on time before you run out of stock.
While this is a useful way to maintain enough inventory to support sellers who self-fulfill Walmart Marketplace listings, it is particularly important for sellers taking advantage of Walmart Fulfillment Services (WFS). While WFS greatly simplifies the fulfillment of Walmart Marketplace orders, it is the responsibility of the seller to ensure that Walmart has been provided with the inventory to fulfill orders on the seller’s behalf. Sellercloud’s Predictive Restocking Tool helps WFS sellers use sales data to determine the ideal timing and quantity of a bulk WFS shipment.
2 Track Your Inventory End-to-End with a Reliable WMS
Having enough inventory on hand is one thing, but you also need to be able to keep track of what you have and where you have it. Should an employee, marketplace, vendor, or customer require up-to-the-minute details about where an item is, you should have that answer and be able to act on that information. That’s where the combination of an inventory management and a warehouse management system (WMS) comes in. Whether you are trying to prepare for incoming supply shipments, receive and organize inventory, locate items in your warehouse, track customer orders, or process returns, you need a dependable, end-to-end solution for keeping tabs on it all. This is the only way you can be sure that your products are always properly stored and/or on the move to where they need to be.
Pairing a comprehensive WMS with an inventory management platform like Sellercloud can take the guesswork out of maintaining accurate stock records and allow for higher-level optimizations of single- or multi-warehouse operations. For example, Skustack, Sellercloud’s patented WMS technology, makes it possible to track inventory movement throughout your upstream and downstream supply chains—both in transit and in the warehouse. With the combination of Skustack’s software and handheld scanners, you and your team can capture product data, control product movements, manage devices, supervise warehouse workflows, and more.
Warehouse visualization technology takes things further. These systems track and monitor the movement of all the people, products, and equipment throughout one or more warehouses, making them fully transparent from a central, cloud-based platform. This empowers a business with the ability to monitor workflows, identify inefficiencies, pinpoint specific SKUs, and generally maintain a bird’s-eye view of their entire operation. All of this adds up to the fact that incorporating a WMS into inventory and fulfillment workflows adds layers of useful organization and data. That data gives sellers the ability to comfortably take control of their own warehousing operations, opening the door to even more opportunities for eCommerce businesses to save serious time and money.
For Jack Saadia, founder of the Saadia Group, Skustack was the key to allowing his business to save on costly outsourcing and bring their warehousing in-house just in time to fulfill orders from a hugely successful Black Friday/Cyber Monday holiday sale. Saadia’s sales manager, Yossi Kbabieh, confirmed, “We looked at several softwares, but Sellercloud and Skustack were the perfect solutions we had been looking for; it answered almost all of the questions we had been asking ourselves about how we could move our operations in-house.”
3 Use Technology to Optimize Your Fulfillment Workflows for Speed and Accuracy
No matter the size or nature of an eCommerce business, a reliable WMS can make it possible to improve the speed of fulfillment workflows—a critical concern for sellers looking to meet Walmart ThreeDay Delivery, Walmart TwoDay Delivery, and Walmart Next Day Delivery guarantees.
Just as technology can improve a business’s ability to track the flow of items through its warehouse, technology can also make a dramatic improvement on how a business directs the ways those products move.
For example, Skublox, Sellercloud’s patented put-to-light and pick-to-light technology, simplifies the process of boxing and preparing orders for shipment. When a fulfillment team receives an order, a picklist is generated in Sellercloud’s software. As items are picked and scanned, team members are directed to a color-coded light wall that illuminates to show where each scanned item belongs. On the other side of the wall, lights signal when an order is fully picked and ready to be packed and labeled for shipment.
Not only can these fulfillment-focused optimizations dramatically decrease handling times, but there are other benefits as well. For one, pick-to-light and put-to-light technology minimizes handling errors—reducing opportunities for mistakes that could result in dissatisfied customers or negative impacts to Walmart Marketplace status. The increased efficiency of systems like these also reduces the number of staff required to perform handling tasks.
Joel Merkur, founder of Stratton Home Decor affirms, “Integrating Sellercloud has cut our staff and labor significantly, and the mistakes made in the warehouse have decreased dramatically. Customers are getting the correct product at the correct time now. Sellercloud has been a critically integral part of our growth in eCommerce.”
Danny Kohanchi, president of Margolin Shoes and Apparel described similar success. In the year immediately following their implementation of Skustack, analysis showed that their previous system “would have never been able to accomplish” what Skustack allowed them to. Kohanchi estimated that they would have needed “50% more staff” to meet their needs without the help of Sellercloud and Skustack. Sellercloud was also able to help Margolin Shoes and Apparel double its sales capacity and cut shipping errors from 5% to less than 1%.
All told, these are the types of tools and improvements that can help Walmart Marketplace sellers reach new heights of profitability and success.
Gain a competitive edge with Sellercloud
As a Walmart Marketplace seller, you need to always have an eye towards strengthening the quantity and quality of your sales conversions. The competitive nature of eCommerce means that every optimization has the potential to result in noteworthy growth. Ultimately, embracing efficient inventory management and fulfillment tools can be a crucial step towards improving your Walmart Marketplace performance, scaling your eCommerce business, and strengthening your reputation as an online retail brand.
Ready to take your eCommerce business to the next level? Sellercloud is an approved Walmart Solution Provider with the unified platform and tools you need to supercharge your online sales workflows and boost your profitability.
Provider Spotlight
Sellercloud provides robust tools that can meet all of your operational needs—inventory and warehouse management, publishing listings to marketplaces, order processing, shipping, and even reporting. We help e-commerce merchants optimize their operational workflow and focus on efficiency and growth. Founded in 2010, Sellercloud has 1000+ clients, employs 100+ staff and is headquartered in Lakewood, New Jersey.
Note: The Information in this guest post has been provided by Sellercloud, please check with them to confirm the details.
