‘Tis The Season: Prep Your Inventory for the Upcoming Holiday Rush

The holiday season is more than just festive times, it’s also one of the most important seasons for retailers of all sizes. From Black Friday to gift-giving events, customers are looking to spend and rely on you to have what they need, when they need it.

This means that your business must properly prepare your inventory for the upcoming surge in sales to prevent a huge loss of possible business. However, the balance can be tricky – not to over prepare and be left with excessive deadstock, but also not to under prepare and have unrealized sales. 

At Order Time, we understand the importance of perfecting your inventory strategy well in advance to prevent any issues for your business or your valued customers.

Our Top Tips

While this may seem obvious, all too often do business neglect to keep up with their calendar as the holiday season sneaks upon us. It is crucial to set calendar reminders to place orders, perform stock-level checks, and keep your team on schedule to have the most profitable holiday season possible. 

Marking a deadline to place orders on your calendar can help you leverage advance orders to ensure you have the proper amounts of stock on hand to keep up with the upcoming surge. To do this, a good rule of thumb is to use historical sales data and reporting tools to make informed business decisions based off previous holiday seasons. 

As your inventory moves on and off shelves throughout the year, it is important to have an accurate grasp on your stock levels at all times so you can know exactly how much of each item you need to order. Running inventory audits help with replenishment, knowing what adjustments need to be made, and can help identify top performing products. 

Ensuring quick and reliable shipping is so important this time of year – customers are typically purchasing for holidays that fall on a specific date. An item arriving even one day past the holiday won't suffice. Therefore, we emphasize having an efficient fulfillment and shipping system in place to prevent any delays. 

Our #1 recommendation is utilizing an automated inventory management system to handle all these functions and way more. Luckily, Order Time is equipped with real-time inventory tracking, tons of integrations, and more to help smoothly process orders from production to customers’ hands.

We’re Here to Help

As customers begin to place orders this holiday season, they rely on business to have accurate item descriptions, images, price comparisons, and other item characteristics so they can make an informed purchase decision. Order Time allows you to create product types, kits, set units of measure, and categorize items for an easy purchasing process. 

Our cloud-based system covers the entire sales cycle to ensure a smooth-purchasing process for you and your valued customers. Easily manage leads and customers as orders are placed, then generate quotes and sales orders with the click of a button. 

The holiday season also brings about special deals and discounts – all of which can be designated using our price leveling tool, so you can set markdowns for special events such as Black Friday or Cyber Monday.

We can't emphasize enough the importance of real-time inventory level management to ensure stocked shelves for customers. Rather than the headache of manually tracking stock, Order Time automates the process by identifying low inventory and reorder points. 

As customers place orders, they rely on a quick fulfilment process. Order Time gives you visibility into inventory locations across multiple warehouses all within one centralized system. Easily track lot and serial numbers to quickly know where your inventory is and where it’s going at all times. 

Order Time seamlessly integrates with tons of different platforms to keep your business running like clockwork, even during the busy holiday season. As an eCommerce business, important customer and contact information with platforms such as BigCommerce, Magento, Shopify, and more to keep all data orderly. 

Manage payments with PayPal as customers place orders. Connecting with QuickBooks or Xero will keep your accounting seamless, accurate, and reliable at all times. Once orders are ready to be sent to customers, our ShipStation integration will handle printing labels, tracking numbers, and more to ensure a smooth delivery process.