Are you a business that sells in the Amazon Marketplace?
Do you have at least 100 individual SKUs and/or generate over $1M in annual sales?
Are you tired of trying to manage all your data in Excel or another software application and looking for something more robust?
Do you want to take your business to the next level with demand forecasting, trend identification, one-click purchase orders, and inventory optimization?
If you answered “yes” to any of these questions, Inventory Planner is going to solve many of your problems.
What the Amazon Marketplace Appstore?
The Marketplace Appstore is a one-stop-shop where the small and medium-sized businesses that sell on Amazon can more easily discover quality applications to help them automate, manage, and grow their business. Accessible from Seller Central, the Marketplace Appstore features applications created by Amazon and external developers and covers a range of functionalities across the selling lifecycle.
What Is Inventory Planner?
Inventory Planner is now available to businesses who sell in the Marketplace Appstore. Inventory Planner is an elegant and robust solution to many of your biggest challenges. Launched in 2013, Inventory Planner is cutting-edge software that allows you to manage your inventory across multiple platforms. It allows you to have the right inventory in the right place at the right time.
Inventory Planner is ideal for small- to medium-sized eCommerce businesses. The sellers who will find the most value in Inventory Planner have annual revenue of over $1M and at least 100 SKUs (individual products). That is an ideal time to upgrade from Excel because this is when operations become increasingly complex.
Inventory Planner’s unique features:
1. Automatic forecast for replenishment. Inventory Planner’s replenishment report shows products and quantities that need to be reordered. Computing accurate forecasting takes into account many factors such as seasonality, out-of-stock periods, average sales, trends, product lead time, and others. Inventory Planner estimates the moment when product is likely to sell out based on the sales forecast and sends you an alert when it is time to purchase more of the product so that you won’t lose any sales. The replenishment report can be used for individual products and also for aggregated sales of categories, brands, or vendors. This allows you a top-level view of how everything is performing in the Amazon Marketplace.
2. Invest in the right inventory with clear overstock identification. Using Inventory Planner’s drag-and-drop feature, create reports based on the metrics most valuable to you. When you invest in new products, data-driven decisions are better than ones based purely on intuition. Revenue forecasting helps to control inventory spending and avoid overstocking without checking each product. With Inventory Planner, you will see sales and revenues for categories, vendors, and brands for a selected time frame. You can see trends and correlations between sales, revenues, and product pageviews.
3. Don’t waste your money overstock – make the most of your inventory. Inventory Planner can identify a products for most effective promotion to get them out of the warehouse and into customers’ hands. Current sales velocity helps determine overstock, and Inventory Planner analyzes common reasons why a product might not be selling well. It prioritizes the list of slow-moving products based on “unrealized revenue” (the difference between the product’s retail value and forecast revenue). By doing so, you can focus on products with high unrealized revenue and significantly improve your inventory turnover.
4. Have all your sales channels in one easy-to-manage place. You can connect your store to Inventory Planner even if you don’t have an automatic connector for your e-commerce platform. All you need to do is prepare your data in the special TSV/Excel format and make it available via a Dropbox or a web server. Inventory Planner will sync this data automatically on the daily basis, so by keeping it up-to-date, you will have the latest data in Inventory Planner. You can not only manage your Amazon Marketplace store, but all your sales channels across many platforms.
5. Create purchase orders with one click. Use replenishment suggestions to create purchase orders. To make the process even easier, upload vendor information and product cost prices to have them prefilled in POs. Once a PO is created, replenishment suggestions are adjusted accordingly. Inventory Planner manages the entire process of product procurement. You can generate invoices, create and edit purchase orders, and mark products as received. You can choose to partially or fully receive purchase orders. Email purchase orders to your suppliers directly from Inventory Planner in the PDF or CSV format. What could be simpler? Inventory Planner allows you to create POs on your multichannel inventory management system.
6. See how your business is growing. You can see which part of your inventory generates the most revenue and profit. Inventory Planner lets you drill down into any category or brand and spot the contribution of each product. It also keeps track of stock levels for each product from the moment of installation. Date comparison makes it easy to evaluate the performance of inventory over time and see the impact of changes. You can also easily compare sales to prior period or prior year, detect trends even with day of week variations, and download date comparison reports to Excel. Make in-depth assortment analysis and spot the current trend in colors, patterns, and sizes. With trend detection, you can also enter the holiday season with a solid idea of which products in the Amazon Marketplace will sell, and what has the potential to turn into holiday overstock.
Summary: Use Inventory Planner to work in your business and not on your business. For small- and medium-sized businesses in the Amazon store, Inventory Planner offers a robust and elegant solution to so many problems that other software solutions just don’t offer. From data-driven forecasts to customizable, one-click purchase orders to inventory optimization, Inventory Planner offers something for most every seller in the Amazon store. Get a demo today and see how Inventory Planner can transform your business!