BigCommerce inventory management guide for manufacturers

When someone in the remotest part of the world can access the internet and do their shopping, it highlights the need for businesses to have an e-commerce store.

If you’re a manufacturer looking for a new e-commerce platform, this is the article for you.

Introducing the B to the C — BigCommerce for B2C sales (and other sales types). BigCommerce is a platform that will help you create an online store and manage your finished goods inventory. However, there are some limitations for manufacturers looking for tools to manage their inventory and production.

So without further ado, here’s the ultimate guide for managing your BigCommerce inventory management as a manufacturer.

What is BigCommerce inventory management?

BigCommerce comes equipped with the necessary tools needed for managing inventory. From inventory tracking to set reorder points. However, the biggest downside for manufacturers is that these features are only available for monitoring finished goods inventory.  

Manufacturers need to track raw materials and work-in-progress inventories too. 

Why is BigCommerce inventory management important?

In recent years, many merchants and manufacturers have drifted to omnichannel selling.  

This needs to focus on this method of selling is because, with technological advancements, customers now expect a smooth and convenient buying process, regardless of where they are or how they’re shopping. This means that manufacturers need to keep and maintain additional stock for each new platform introduced into their selling process.

According to Think with Google, research collected found that:

• 80% more shop visits are generated as a result of omnichannel tactics
• 59% of consumers said that choosing a brand or retailer is influenced by their ability to purchase on a mobile device
• According to a global survey, 56% of in-store customers used their cell phones to look up products or conduct product research within the preceding week   

But even though there’s a broad consensus that adopting an omnichannel sales process is essential, according to another study, only 18% of small businesses in the US use inventory management software or systems.  

Getting ahead of the curve and the competition could be as simple as adopting an omnichannel sales strategy alongside inventory management tools in your business. This is where BigCommerce inventory management comes in. Don’t let the word big in the name scare you. You can manage your small business with BigCommerce or even a large enterprise. 

Its native features give users the tools to integrate their storefronts and manage their inventory, all from BigCommerce.  

However, manufacturers who need more functionality to manage production will be glad to know that BigCommerce integrates with manufacturing software.  

We’ll look more into manufacturers using BigCommerce later, but for now, it’s important to set up BigCommerce inventory management to:  

• Improve the accuracy of your inventory tracking  
• Make better data-driven decisions  
• Improve the productivity of your business 

How to set-up BigCommerce inventory management

The good news — setting up inventory management in BigCommerce is straightforward. 

The bad news — you can only track finished or sellable goods. 

But, at the very least, BigCommerce is built to be as straightforward as possible when setting up your online platform. 

In this following chapter, we’ll focus on adding new products and highlighting the most important features for manufacturers selling online. We will simplify the process by only showing the steps to set up inventory tracking to make it easier to understand. However, you’ll quickly see how easy it is to set up your store and products as we go through. 

Adding new products for inventory tracking

You’ve created your store and are ready to start adding products. 

Below you can find a brief video of the process: 

To the left of the dashboard, you’ll see a menu. Go ahead and select “Products” to access the inventory screen. Once here, simply go ahead and click “Add” 

This will take you to the “Add Product” screen. You can now start adding all the relevant information. This information you can update includes: 

• Product name 
• SKU 
• Product type — physical or digital 
• Default price — excluding tax 
• Brand 
• Weight — for shipping purposes 
• Categories for selling products — you can create new categories at this stage too 

This is the first step. Once you have finished that, you can either scroll down through the different sections or use the “Product Information” menu on the left to skip to specific sections. Each section is important, and continuing allows you to update: 

• Description 
• Images and videos 
• Product identifies 
• Taxes 
• Storefront information 
• Fulfillment requirement 
• SEO 

However, we’re going to focus on the inventory management functionalities of BigCommerce. 

So, moving on to “Inventory”  

Here you have the option to enable if you wish to start tracking these items at product or variant level — but you’ll need to set up your variants if you want to track at the variant level. Either way, here you can set your current stock levels and low stock levels, aka your reorder points. 

If your product comes in different variants, you can configure them in the next section called “Variations” 

Go ahead and click “Add Variant” which will open the configuration page to define your variations. Under “Name” you can select the variation — for example, color. Under “Values” you can determine the different types of that variation — like red, green, and blue. 

There is also “Type” which simply means how the variations will appear on your website. 

Once you’re finished, back at “Product Options” you’ll find a generated list of all your variations, and you can set individual stock levels, reorder points, and prices for each one. 

Finally, there’s “Modifier” which is a fancy way of saying if you provide customizable options for customers, such as custom text printed on a product. 

As mentioned, there’s a lot more you’ll need to do when setting up your products, but in a nutshell, that’s how to set up BigCommerce inventory management.

What about BigCommerce Advanced Inventory?

Once you’ve added your products and updated inventory levels, select “Advanced Inventory” to further configure other settings.

You can hide products or redirect customers to a category page if you have stock-outs. Display stock levels beneath displayed products for customers — nothing adds incentive to purchase than reading how little stock is available. And finally, you can set up out-of-stock or low-stock notifications to be sent to a preferred email address.

6 tips to optimize your inventory management in BigCommerce

Now you know how to add your products and set up inventory tracking on your BigCommerce account. Next is understanding how to perfect your control. You can use the following steps to get started. 

1. Demand forecasting

Demand forecasting, sometimes called demand planning, analyzes previous sales to determine future selling trends.  

This will help you optimize stock levels by saving resources and avoid accumulating slow-moving inventory. This will, in turn, increase profits by only producing the products you’ll sell. By doing your demand planning accurately, you can predict future revenue and get total control over your inventory. 

2. Tracking bundles

Creating bundles or inventory kitting is an excellent tactic for removing dead stock, managing deals, and organizing inventory.  

However, as you’ll be more than likely selling the same products individually and in bundles, it’s essential to have a means of accurately tracking inventory counts across all iterations of the product. The worst thing that can happen is running out of inventory but still having bundles available. Not properly tracking bundles will lead to order cancellations and harm your reputation with customers.  

Want to learn how to track bundles? Read our article Kitting out your online store with product bundles of joy and start driving more sales to your BigCommerce store. 

3. Follow the 80/20 rule for your products

The 80/20 rule can be applied to every aspect of life and business. Understanding this will help you identify the 20% of your products that account for most of your sales and better target new visitors to your store with these products. Taking this approach will improve your site’s customer satisfaction and user experience.  

4. Determine product lifecycle

Product lifecycle management (PLM) is the process of understanding how to handle products as they move through different stages of a product’s life: 

• Development 
• Introduction 
• Growth 
• Stability 
• Decline 

5. Don’t hate, automate

Once you have focused on the previous points, now is the time to make your life and customers’ lives easier with automation.  

For example, building or finding tools that can automate your inventory management will speed up the process and reduce the potential of making mistakes. Automating different functions in your workflow will free up resources and help better understand real-time inventory movements. What’s great about BigCommerce is its integration with many different tools to synchronize information traveling between manufacturing, sales, and accounting, like QuickBooks Online. 

6. Centralize sales, inventory, and manufacturing with 3rd party software

Following on from the last point, connecting your different tools to make a centralized point of truth to monitor your entire business.  

This level of control over your business is important, especially for manufacturers, as they need to plan production, manage different types of inventories, and other important aspects of running a business. Better still, you can integrate BigCommerce to your other sales channels to implement an omnichannel selling approach into your sales strategy.