Top 7 Inventory Management Tools for Magento 2
Why should you care more about managing your store inventory?
Wise inventory management is vital for the success of any eCommerce business. Proper inventory management helps with many issues. Firstly, it helps to improve customer experience by providing flexibility and excluding errors with unfulfilled products due to a possible lack of items in the stock.
According to a study performed by Veeqo, 70% of customers would purchase a product from a competitor if it was unavailable rather than waiting for it to come back in stock.
Besides, it also helps to improve cash flow and optimize fulfillment to ensure everything is put and stored correctly and can be packed and shipped to customers in the shortest time.
There are a lot of important things inventory management can help you figure out, including:
- What to order in the future: Our economy is a rapidly moving cycle of trends and fads. One day, some random product is selling more than anything else ever has, and the next day it’s forgotten. There is no part of the economy where this is more true than in eCommerce. With good inventory management, you can figure out what needs to be ordered to fulfill the next trend.
- When to order your next shipment: This is probably the most common advantage of inventory management. If you’re selling a specific product, you want to know when you need to get more. Some products might sell out faster than others, and inventory management helps you triage.
- How much more to get: A product running low doesn’t necessarily tell you how popular it is. Did it take three months to sell a dozen units or one week to sell a hundred units? Inventory management tells you how many sales to expect in a given period, allowing you to buy more when you need it, and spend less when you don’t.
Best Inventory Management Solutions for Magento 2 e-commerce store
There are a number of tools and B2B Extensions for Magento 2 to help you grow your business. In this article, we highlight the Top 7 Inventory Tools for Magento.
1. Inventory Management by Magestore
Price starts from $599
This inventory tool by Magestore provides an option to create a single product catalog for all channels and seamlessly sync the product data to exclude any possible errors and manage your multi-warehouse inventory more efficiently.
You can track your business profit, define the best-selling products, and customize UI/UX design to differentiate your business from the competitors.
You can also use inventory API to connect to external platforms and systems.
2. Advanced Inventory by Wyomind
Price starts from $310
With Wyomind, you can easily sync your POS and Magento inventory, create an unlimited number of stock levels, dispatch your orders both manually and automatically. Also, you can display all the points of sale using Google Maps and make setting up your dropshipping easier by notifying the warehouses of all incoming orders.
A great feature that distinguishes Wyomind from other similar tools is a restricted access option that allows you to create roles and assign permissions for staff members and store owners.
3. Advanced Inventory Management by Veeqo
Price starts from $156
Veeqo is an all-in-one solution that not only includes omnichannel inventory management but also handles your store orders, shipping, and returns.
It has excellent forecasting features allowing you to analyze your sales and define your best-selling products, which you can then put in a product bandle, pack, and ship to your customers in just a few clicks.
4. Multi Warehouse Inventory by Aitoc
Price starts from $299
An open-source extension for Magento 1 and Magento 2 allows you to manage your warehouses and automatically offers to choose the nearest one at the checkout, reducing the time and costs for both customers and your business.
5. Multi Warehouse Inventory by Amasty
Price starts from $349
Besides basic features, the Amasty extension allows you to unite several sources via stocks and link them to the sales channels. It keeps track of sales, uses built-in algorithms to optimize your delivery costs, set up custom shipping methods, export, and import any critical data. You can also use this extension to edit your products in bulk.
6. Inventory management by Unleashed
Price starts from $299
This cloud-based inventory solution is great for stores with multiple locations since you can add an unlimited number of warehouses to manage, get access to real-time data on stock levels, costs, and tracking information. You can sync Unleashed with several other platforms, including Magento 2; the extension includes powerful analytics to track your success.
The solution also has a mobile app that might be helpful for your sales team.
7. M2e Pro
Price: Free
An interesting detail about this solution is that it’s free if your business profit is less than $10k a month. Since it is a native Magento extension, you don’t need any API credentials to set it up in your store. M2e Pro has a robust listing functionality and task automatization that saves you time and nerves when dealing with your data management routine.
Additional Tips For Better Inventory Management
On any eCommerce platform, a good inventory management system makes things a lot easier. We hope that you discovered a tool that fits your budget and needs.
But the tools themselves aren’t the full equation. Inventory management is something that needs to be perfect consistently. With other tools (like shipping estimators or automatic emailing), a small malfunction here and there is no big deal.
With inventory management, the smallest mistakes can prove disastrous. At best, you risk having no idea of how much inventory you possess. At worst, you could potentially be selling customers products that never reach their doorstep. That’s not good for business. Let’s go over some common strategies for great inventory management:
- Keep a backup supply: As we said before, the worst possible outcome of poor inventory management is a paying customer never getting their product. Unfortunately, we live in a world full of surprises. Maybe a natural or man-made disaster ruins your inventory. Maybe the shipping route cannot be fulfilled in a reasonable time. Thus it’s always good to have extra products (especially ones that are convenient to ship from your location) at all times.
- Find equilibrium: Capitalist economics can be boiled down to one big idea: Getting to the sweet spot between too much supply and demand. When you first launch a product, you might not have a great idea of how it will do. The product could flop, leaving you with extra units and wasted money. Conversely, the product could be in high demand, and customers might take their business elsewhere if you can’t provide it to them in a reasonable amount of time. When you use inventory management, your ultimate goal is to keep inventory levels balanced between these two extremes. With enough time (and a good management tool), you can get it down to an exact science.
- Think about physical space: When doing electronic eCommerce, it can be easy to forget how your products will take up real space. The phrase “100 units” sounds like an abstract figure until you have the task of storing them all on your property. If your online shop is centered around dropshipping, you aren’t safe from this tip. Physical space affects every part of your business model, from shipping cost/time to raw materials and even the marketing tools you use.
- Figure out how to move more products: An eCommerce website with many products can quickly accumulate leftover “junk” products from previous sales. The best strategy for dealing with these is through promotions and discounts. Perhaps you can do a “Buy X get Y 50% off” program or find another way to entice customers to buy your extra products.
Looking for more ways to improve your Magento 2 store? Check out 5 Best PIM Solutions For Your Magento 2 Store or contact us to receive personalized consultation on your business development.
