Are you running a Magento based ecommerce store? If yes, you might have faced a situation wherein you have disappointed your customers. And thereafter, you had to send them an email saying “Your order is cancelled due to non-availability of stock.” Well, one of the major reasons behind the occurrence of such situation is - poor inventory management.

A superior inventory management process is imperative for running a successful ecommerce business. Tying up your cash with more stock or having too little inventory; both these scenarios can have a negative impact on your business, customers, and finance.

To overcome stock-in and stock out related problems in Magento, you would need a Magento inventory management extension. It is quite baffling to choose the right inventory management extension as there are several companies providing similar Magento extensions. To help you get over these confusions, we have come up with some pointers that can help you make the right choice:

Real-Time Inventory Management Facility
Imagine this scenario. You have 50 items in stock. And suddenly shoppers start demanding that item in large numbers. Now, before you put the item’s real time stock update, customers order reaches to 52. During such times, you might have to apologize asking stating that there would be a delay in fulfilling the order. Result? Customer dissatisfaction. And before you know, this latency leads you to financial losses.

Having an inventory management system that provides approximate inventory updates is not enough. Neither a system that requires manual updates. Therefore, you need to choose a Magento inventory management system that offers real time auto inventory data updates. While choosing an extension, real-time updates facility is a feature you must ask for. Without fail.

Provision of Drop Shipping Facility
What if you could offload fulfillment of your customers’ demands on supplier when you run out of stock? Sounds like quite a business saver. Doesn’t it? If you get inventory management for Magento store with a drop shipping facility, you can make this possible. A drop shipping supplier relationship comes to rescue at the point of time you run out of stock.

Wondering how falling back on drop shipping can help you? Well, it enables you to auto forward your incoming orders to your widget supplier when you sold the last widget in your stock. After the supplier fulfills your customer demand, they can put the status order back to your store. This way, drop shipping, helps you to fulfill every order of your customer and keep them happy with your e-store service.

24*7 Inventory Management Monitoring
Managing a huge inventory is a tricky business. Things can go wrong at any point of time resulting into failure in delivery. Hence, you need a tool that offers 24*7 inventory monitoring mechanism. Search on the web and you will find several Magento inventory management extensions that offer a facility like this one. Also, you need to ensure that you keep maintaining this software at regular intervals through professionals so that there are no flaws in the monitoring process.

Remember, system malfunctioning can lead to huge business losses in a span of a night. And thereafter, you might have to spend days to fix the problem. So, it is better to go for an extension that does what it says in a seamless manner.

Conclusion
You can get rid of your stock in and out problems by integrating the right inventory management extension for your Magento store. Don’t forget to see to it your extension has the above-mentioned attributes so that you can manage inventory in the best way possible.