4 tactics to sell excess inventory

4 tactics to sell excess inventory

Today's online businesses are dealing with a variety of inventory problems. Unfortunately, the majority of these problems are out of your hands. However, you can influence how your ecommerce site adjusts and reacts to changes in stock levels.

Customers tell us that certain inventory is building up as a result of fulfilment delays. We'll go through four ways to get that stock moving again. There's also a link at the bottom to a free eBook, which goes into greater detail and provides more instances to help you.

1. Boosting the right products on your store

The first tactic is to find products that are popular amongst your customers that have good stock availability and boosting these in your search results. You are essentially making them more visible based on what your customer data is telling you -- much like you would layout your popular items you have in-stock when a customer first walks into your physical store.

2. Bundling products to cross and upsell

The second tactic is to bundle products together. This is a great way to cross-sell and upsell complementary items. For example, if you’re selling excess inventory of winter coats, you could create a bundle that includes a coat, scarf, hat, and gloves. Not only will this move inventory faster, but it will also increase your average order value.

3. Off-loading final sale items

The third tactic is to unload final sale items with rule-based merchandising. This inventory is taking up valuable space on your website and in your fulfilment centre. You can set your own criteria for when products should move up and down search results pages. Badges on products that highlight “last chance” or “final sale” are also great for encouraging purchase behaviour and creating urgency.

4. Creating urgency around new arrivals

The fourth and final tactic is to create urgency around new arrivals. This could mean alerting your loyal customers to new product drops on the site, the use of product badges to highlight new products high in stock and ready to ship or perhaps even running a flash sale. The key is to get customers excited about the new products coming in.

Don't let excess goods sit on page two of your results; if they can't discover it, they won't buy it. If you're having trouble moving stock, take a look at your merchandising plan and shift your attention. You may reignite consumers' interest by reframing and positioning those hard-to-move items in a different light.

More where that came from

Perhaps one of the most illuminating findings was in the top cohort’s use of integrations to build their tech stack. As GMV increased, so did their usage of categorical third-party applications, such as email marketing, SMS, analytics, and sales and conversion tools.

This is just the tip of the iceberg—and as we said, here’s a link to download the full eBook by Searchspring. Get in touch to talk other ways to grow your business.

A huge thank you to the beautiful folks at Searchspring for their assistance.