Etail Solutions Blog

Not carrying enough high-demand stock costs you sales. Carrying too much low-demand stock ties up capital. Etail Solutions' newly released inventory and FBA replenishment feature solves this problem once and for all by calculating what, when, and how much to order - so you always have what your customers want and not what they don't.

You've been on Amazon for years, doing everything right - you think! Then you receive the following email: 

"We have removed your selling privileges, cancelled your listings, and placed a temporary hold on any funds in your seller account. We took these actions because you have listed items that are not permitted on Amazon.com."

Banned?! What the ...! You sell beauty items - things to make people look good! 

Unfortunately, this is not an isolated incident. Over the past year, hundreds of online merchants got the boot for offering restricted items on Amazon, mostly health and beauty products which contain specific outlawed ingredients.

No matter what you sell online - books, bicycles, or backpacks - if your price is lower than your competitors sales will skyrocket. Surprisingly, some merchants hesitate to buy into this approach because it would mean giving up short-term profits. Regardless of your philosophy, this post - which has nothing to do with repricing - will show you how to consistently outprice your competitors and drive sales volume through the roof. In fact, one of our clients used this simple strategy to double sales in less than 4 months. Keep reading to find out how you can do the same.

More hours in the day. It's the one thing every multi-channel merchant wants, and yet it's impossible to attain. But what if you could free up significant amounts of time to focus on the responsibilities that really matter? This post resumes our series about online inventory management and expands the concept of having a single master SKU for every item in its base unit of measure. This way you can eliminate the time-consuming task of creating and managing duplicate SKUS and replace it with a value-added one like adding new products, sales channels, and suppliers.  

To find out which, how many, and where items in different units of measure are selling, most sellers have to manually merge data from duplicate SKUs. This blog post explains how to remove this bottleneck so it no longer interferes with your ability to grow your business. While other sellers are feeling the stress of using outdated and ineffective methods to manage inventory, you'll feel in complete control knowing your inventory levels are perfectly in sync as you buy and sell.

1. Seamless Integration

Your repricer should integrate with both the sales and supply side of your business. Real-time visibility into your variable and fixed costs is necessary to achieving and protecting your desired markup percentage. If your floor and ceiling values aren’t dynamically driven by real-time cost changes (product, fulfillment, sales, overhead, etc.) you’re putting your profit margins at risk.

1. Not Repricing When Costs Change

Whenever any of your costs change - product, fulfillment, sales, or overhead - a repricing event must happen immediately so your margins and Buy Box ownership are protected. If you use FBA or ship from stock and buy a new batch of inventory at a different price from those of prior purchases, repricing must occur because average per unit cost has changed. If you drop ship or cross-dock and your supplier publishes new prices via their data feed, repricing must also take place because product cost has changed.

The Etail Vantage Platform (EVP) is a multi-channel management platform with 7 core components, created to solve the real-world problems of mid-to-high volume online merchants. These core components consist of a wide range of features and functionalities that greatly enhance online multi-channel businesses, however, merchants rarely know about them until they start using EVP. They include: an enterprise class repricing engine, supplier scouting, advanced inventory functionality, like kits (bundles) and assembly items - to name just a few. Starting today, we will be devoting a blog post to each one of these robust tools so you can see how they work.