Fulfillment and Inventory Management

How to manage inventory and data to minimize loss of sales

Consider removing stale records

Unavailability can often occur not just because a book has sold elsewhere, but also because the book has been misplaced or inadvertently moved, be it in your warehouse or your brick and mortar store. This is most common with the oldest of your book records.

You may wish to consider removing your oldest book records (often books with the lowest bookIDs). Then, depending on how you have cataloged your stock, you could re-inventory this stock. Rather than removing the oldest records, you could also review your catalogs to see which have worked well for you in terms of sales.

Before making any bulk deletions, we suggest speaking with our Customer Support Department to ensure that all of the data is managed properly and that deletions are carried out in the most effective and efficient manner.

Keep your Internet stock separate from your Brick and Mortar stock

If you have a large number of un-cataloged records, you might consider splitting this stock between your internet business and your physical store. There are several positive benefits to this:

Even if your Brick and Mortar shelf space is full, you can continue to upload stock online, thereby giving more of your inventory exposure to the buying public.
You do not need to worry about the books you offer online being sold in your store, or being misplaced on another shelf by buyers or staff member.

Integrate your Point of Sales system with your online inventory database

If your business has a high daily turnover in-store, it is beneficial to integrate your point of sales system with your database of internet stock. This is definitely a ‘second best’ to having separate internet stock, as explained above. If you have not yet integrated these, we recommend your considering this as an option. It can not only prevent lost sales, but it can also save many man hours for you or your technician.

If you have programmers on staff, AbeBooks does have tools to help you integrate your system with ours. Please click here for more details.

Consolidate your data

If you are running two databases, we suggest merging the two into one database. If you require more than one computer in your shop, you could use HomeBase networking, which allows you to use more than one system to update one central database. For more information on this, please click here.