The Inventory Challenge
You need a lot more inventory to sell effectively on line. Even if you limit online sales to a dozen or so products in each category, you may need to stock these items at least twelve deep or risk running out. The old “one to show and one to go” won’t cut it.
Consumers have high expectations when they shop on line. They expect that when a product shows on line as being available, and your shopping cart software charges their credit card for it, you will ship it within 24 hours — if not the same business day.
This means you need to be ready for demand that can spike wildly. For any given item, you might go days without selling a single one, and then get a half dozen or more orders within hours or each other. Will you be ready?
Most shopping cart software does not integrate with any sort of inventory control system (Intuit’s Homestead program is one exception). To keep from having to field dozens of irate phone calls every day, you must be able to show what is in stock and what is not. And if you cannot keep most items in stock at all times, no one will want to buy from you.
You know how much you have tied up in inventory right now. If you want to sell on line (and in sufficient volume to offset your startup costs), you are going to need to at least triple that — if not more. You’ve got that much in your piggy bank — right?
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