Inventory - a stock room full of unsold widgets

[burt]

I've been giving some thought to how you might manage your slow-selling lines over time...

Do you have stock that you would describe as 'dead' - meaning it no longer turns over, or you've more or less given up on it selling through in the ordinary course of things?

As a shop owner, how do you decide when something crosses that line.
Is it a length of time?
A certain number of units left?
Or more of a gut feeling?

Once you've identified something as dead stock, what do you do about it, if anything - mark it down heavily into special offer, try to bundle it up with other items, send it back to a supplier, or just leave it sitting on a shelf and hope it sells now and then until stock is gone.

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I understand that different shopowners do things in very different ways -> I'm trying to drill down on how to make some sort of addon that will identify "dead stock" `automatically`, and do something about it for you `automatically`.

EG; push product to special, reduce price but don't put to special, flag it as a spotlight, push it to featured products and so on.

[bonbec]

I have two scenarios:
1) Products I manufacture: I produce a small quantity the first time.
If it sells well, I produce a larger quantity and repeat the process as soon as the stock is low.
If it doesn't sell well, I wait until I have one or two units left before producing another small quantity (10 units maximum).

2) Products I buy to resell: the dust on the products tells me which ones aren't selling (LOL). During the next sales, these products will be sold at a loss.

This gives me an idea: in the product details in the admin panel, the date of the product's last sale could be displayed. This could then be used as a search criterion for products that are in stock but haven't been sold in a long time. In the results list, one or more buttons would appear, allowing users to put a product on sale or promotion with a single click, or even a single button for the same action for all products.

[burt]

TY Fred, appreciate your post.

1) Products I manufacture: I produce a small quantity the first time.
If it sells well, I produce a larger quantity and repeat the process as soon as the stock is low.
If it doesn't sell well, I wait until I have one or two units left before producing another small quantity (10 units maximum).

I imagine most `hand made` sellers do similar.

This pings another idea, should I ever make this addon - have a switch or something to say "product excluded" from whatever the addon might do.

2) Products I buy to resell: the dust on the products tells me which ones aren't selling (LOL). During the next sales, these products will be sold at a loss.

This helps clarify another thought I had. One of the mechanisms might be some sort of breakdown of "how many instock" vs "how many sold in last `period` (determined by shopowner). For example, if you have 50 widgets in stock and sold 2 in the last 6 months...you have YEARS worth of stock on hand. That's money...doing nothing.

This gives me an idea: in the product details in the admin panel, the date of the product's last sale could be displayed. This could then be used as a search criterion for products that are in stock but haven't been sold in a long time. In the results list, one or more buttons would appear, allowing users to put a product on sale or promotion with a single click, or even a single button for the same action for all products.

That is sort of what I'm thinking, but fully automatic. Your idea is just as valuable -> not fully automatic, but gathering data in an easier place to allow you to make a better/easier decision of what to do with this product.

[14Steve14]

We seem to do what others do. We are quite lucky in that we can buy low quantities and have them delivered to us within a few days from most of our suppliers so we rarely get left with dead stock. Saying that we do have some that has sat here for ages. We have tried, and partially succeeded, in adding them to the sales section, but some still remain in the clearance category, which will eventually get put onto our ebay site as sold cheap.

We use an older addon which has been updated to show product sales. Within this report we have sales split into 1, 3, 6, and 12 months plus an overall total which shows which products are selling and which are not. There is a date column for date of last sale so we can see when the last one was sold. The problem being that with nearly 4000 products the list is mighty long and products take some finding so we must (note to self) add in a search feature.

We also added in a hook to the categories section which shows total sales of each product which we do find helpful, but it is a bit basic and I am sure more could be made of this if we wanted it. As you know, if you can remember, you created a reorders hook for us which contains lots of information and we have added in date of last sale and number sold in there also which helps guide us when we are reordering as we can see what we have sold over a period of 6 months.

If we were to want any bit of this automated it would be to produce a list of products that have not sold since a certain date. We could then keep an eye on these products and adjust the price accordingly, or even move them to the sales section and again reduce the prices, but do it manually as sales prices are really dependant on cost price and we wouldn't want to reduce so far that we loose money whilst stocks are still high. We usually leave the real bargains until there are only a few remaining.

Hope this help you is some way.