It’s the end of a season, and you’ve found yourself with a problem—you have leftover inventory taking up valuable space and jamming up your cash flow!
Whether it’s from changing product trends or not using a good inventory management system, excess or aging inventory can pose a problem for your online selling store. You need to turn a profit while reducing aging inventory. That’s where a creative sales strategy comes in.
Here are five quick and creative ways to reduce inventory, clear out your warehouse, and renew customers’ interest in older stock so you don’t lose the profits.
1. Mystery Items
Mystery item sales are one of e-commerce’s hottest trends for a good reason. It’s a creative method to reduce aged inventory and slow-selling products in a way that gets customers excited to buy more from your online boutique. Shoppers love mystery items because it’s a low-risk gamble that guarantees a win—a surprise order from their favorite brands!
When posting mystery item sales, give your shoppers some information about what they can expect. Items could be from any given season or style. You can even promise to give them items up to a certain retail value.
Automating mystery item selection makes it simple to deliver on these promises. You can set the criteria for mystery—like price limits or days it’s been in your inventory—and give your shoppers products they’ve never bought before.
2. Multi-item Sales Posts
Including multi-item product selections or bundled items in your shoppable posts can help sell more things at once rather than selling them individually. It’s an upselling technique to make products irresistible for shoppers by grouping them with complementary or compatible items. For instance, if you sell apparel, you can sell curated looks by creating a Shop the Look Facebook post.
Multi-item Shop the Look posts can reframe how shoppers look at specific products, convincing buyers to shop for more than they came for. You can pair some accessories with a dress, and your customer suddenly sees more than a pair of shoes and earrings; they see the perfect date night outfit for the weekend.
3. Coupon Codes
Coupons are highly effective in converting a person casually browsing items into your customer, making them an indispensable tool for inventory aging reduction for any e-commerce business. You can create and customize coupons for older or seasonal collections or cross-sell items to encourage shoppers to reach the cart total to claim discounts.
92% of shoppers search for a coupon before making a purchase. By simply having coupons for your brand, you can easily increase the likelihood of people buying from your e-commerce business. You can use live selling to market these coupons and discounts as limited-time offers to drive more sales by creating exclusivity and FOMO (fear of missing out), which can help your brand reduce inventory even more effectively.
4. Live Sales
Live selling is becoming essential for any brand in the digital age. Livestreaming on platforms like Facebook, Twitch, YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok has the highest organic reach of any social post, so shops everywhere use them as their personalized selling channels.
Businesses have achieved over 5x growth with live selling. The ability to deliver hyper-engaging, customized shopping experiences on multiple platforms at once is behind the success of live selling, making it a fantastic way to reduce aging inventory.
Live sales use urgency, limited quantities, competition, and real-time customer engagement to accelerate sales, making them the perfect tool for offloading inventory.
5. Auto-reposts
Repeating previous sales posts is another way to move aging inventory by allowing shoppers to shop even when you’re offline.
Some tools allow you to automatically post shoppable replays of your live sales on your website, mobile app, and social channels. You can also edit and post chunks of shoppable replays as TikTok’s or Instagram posts to keep selling old inventory.
Scheduling shoppable posts can also help bump older items back to your customers’ newsfeeds with minimal work on your part, helping you reduce aging inventory.
The Takeaway
Inventory reduction is a part of smart inventory management. All retailers must face it at some point, so preparing for it in advance makes sense. Strategies like live selling, shoppable posts, and item bundling will give your shoppers a fresh perspective on your aging inventory, so you can get rid of it quickly.
You’ll need to pair these strategies with a good inventory management system to stay ahead of rising excess inventory. A quality system will keep inventory information up to date in real-time, automate unnecessary tasks, and give you detailed inventory insights so you can discover customer demand, cut carrying costs, and pinpoint aged and obsolete inventory at a glance.
