62 posts tagged with "Inventory"

Every catalog has products on the way out, and until now "discontinued" mostly meant remembering not to reorder something. Open purchase orders kept arriving, backorders kept piling up, the replacement product started with no sales history, and the leftover stock sat in the warehouse until someone noticed. Product lifecycle gives every product a state — Active, Phasing out or Discontinued, plus any of your own — and SKU.io acts on it: it stops reordering, shows you exactly what a change will affect before you confirm it, and gives you one place to watch the remaining stock sell through and clear it with markdowns or a closeout offer.

A customer orders a throw that's on your shelf and a table that's on preorder. The order can't ship until the table arrives, but the throw still comes off your shelf and sits there for weeks. Meanwhile a newer order that only wants the throw gets backordered, and your store shows it as out of stock or on preorder while a unit is sitting in the warehouse. Ship with preorder fixes that. When an incoming purchase order for the in-stock item will arrive in time for the preorder item, SKU.io reserves the in-stock item from that purchase order instead of the shelf. The order still ships at about the same time, and the shelf unit goes to the next order waiting for it or stays free to sell.

A demand plan tells you what you need. It doesn't tell you what you can pay for. When stock ties up most of your cash, the real question is "what should I buy with the money I actually have this week, and what can wait?" Until now you answered it in a spreadsheet, supplier by supplier, guessing which bills land when. Buy within your cash answers it inside Demand Planning. Tell SKU.io your cash, your credit line and the balance you never plan below. It works out what you can spend each week after the bills you already owe. Then it ranks every reorder line from every supplier and shows where the money runs out.

Seasonal buyers plan months ahead and manage month by month, and the budget usually lives in a spreadsheet nobody else can see. It goes stale the moment a purchase order lands. Open-to-buy planning brings that budget into SKU.io. Create a season, plan what each category or brand should sell, mark down and hold at month end, and SKU.io works out how much you still need to buy. Purchase orders count against the budget as they're placed. Once the season starts, plan sits beside actual so you can see a category drifting before it's over budget.

If you sell apparel, you don't buy a style: you buy a size run. Order every size evenly and you sell out of the middle sizes while the ends sit on the shelf. A style's stock is spread across dozens of variants, so spotting the gaps means scrolling a long list. Sizes and colours puts the size run front and centre. Derive a size curve from how a style really sold. See its stock as a grid of sizes and colours and reorder the gaps in one go. Compare sizes across every vendor in one report.

A torn seam at the register, a crushed box on the shelf: damaged items are small, constant and easy to lose track of. Creating an RMA for every one is too much work, so they get binned, the stock count drifts, and the money the supplier owes you is never claimed. Damage capture records a damaged item in one step. It moves the unit to a blemished SKU so it stops counting as sellable stock and records the loss in your books. If the supplier should pay for it, it raises a draft credit claim with them in the same step.

A thousand units at a fulfillment center in California do little for a buyer in Ohio. Marketplaces place your stock where it suits them, and until now SKU.io showed it as one number per network, so you couldn't tell that most of a SKU sat on the West Coast while a third of its buyers live in the East. Regional coverage adds that missing view to the Send Planner. For every SKU and network, it estimates the share of buyers within two days of your stock, shows which regions are thin, and shows what this plan's send does about it. You can also play back how your stock spread over the last months.

Changing a handful of values across a list used to mean either opening each record or trusting that every keystroke in the grid was the one you meant. Editable Mode is now a real spreadsheet, and nothing you type is saved until you've seen it. Make all your changes, open Review & save, check each old value against the new one, and save them together, or throw them all away.

Every online store we have run sat on a CMS: an admin login, a stack of plugins and a theme, each one something to patch, defend and pay for. Stores are built differently now. A coding agent can write any design you can describe, so the store doesn't need a screen for a person to click through. It needs a standard, an API, and the freedom to look like anything. So we built one. Storefront is our open-source store kit, with no CMS in the middle, and starting today SKU.io connects to a Storefront store as a sales channel. Orders flow in, and stock, tracking and products flow back out, with no plugins and no keys to copy.

Your 3PL counts the stock on its shelves, and SKU.io keeps its own count of the same stock. When the two drift apart, you either sell stock that isn't there or hide stock you could be selling — and comparing them by hand is unreliable, because orders keep shipping while you look. 3PL inventory comparison checks the two against each other automatically, every day, warehouse by warehouse. It rewinds SKU.io to the exact moment the 3PL counted, so a shipment in flight never shows up as a false difference. Where the 3PL is right, you accept its count and SKU.io creates the stock takes for you.