How Much Inventory do you Need for your Fashion Retail Store?

Do you ever feel that people are not buying from you because you don’t have enough stock? Does more stock mean more sales? We know that it’s not true, especially in the Business of Fashion E-commerce. You don’t need an inventory of thousands of SKUs to build a Profitable Fashion E-commerce brand. Your customers will always expect to see more and more product variety, but you can’t let their expectations dictate your inventory decisions. Here is the thing about having a huge inventory:

• More inventory means more warehousing cost
• More investment in product presentation (photography, fashion copywriting etc)
• You will have to hire more people to manage a bigger inventory
• If you can’t write original content for all these products, Google can penalize you for duplicate or narrow content
• With more product pages, your link juice gets spread across more pages and hence dilutes your website’s ranking potential on Google
• Promoting so individual products on Social Media can become practically impossible
• More buying mistakes – more money getting stuck in un-sold dead stock
• You will need more money to promote these products

But that doesn’t mean you should have a small inventory. You obviously would want to scale-up your inventory as the demand of your products increase? This is how businesses grow, right? But we’re talking about striking a balance.

How much inventory should you have if you’re a start-up?

Here is what we recommend: “Your online store should have only so many products that you’re able to write quality product descriptions, meta tags and click professional pictures; all with the available resources at your disposal. If the number of products on your store are so many that you’re unable to write quality product descriptions & meta tags and click professional pictures, your store is either overloaded with stock or it’s time to hire more people in your production team.”

Never let the inventory size exceed your ability to present it on your store. Don’t compromise with the perceived value of your products at the cost of showing more inventory.

It’s a simple rule that you can follow to keep the size of your inventory in check.