Challenge and Opportunity: Omnichannel Inventory Management for Peak Season Success

A large percentage of retailers’ annual revenue occurs during peak season, causing retailers year after year to watch the upcoming season’s consumer spending predictions like a hawk. They’re under pressure to maximize efficiency and capture every potential sale. Retailers cannot afford to lose revenue due to stockouts, overstocking, or fulfillment delays.

No matter if the next peak season sets records or disappoints, optimized omnichannel inventory management is becoming essential for retailers to remain competitive and maximize profits.

Peak Season: Challenge and Opportunity go Hand-in-Hand

Omnichannel retailers have an opportunity every year to grow market share and strengthen customer loyalty. If they successfully position themselves to meet customer demand and have the operational efficiency to reduce costs, they improve their chances of increased revenue and growth.

That is the opportunity, but naturally, it comes with its share of challenges standing in the way. For omnichannel retailers, preparing for peak season demand also means preparing for the complex decision-making that goes along with it. They must be agile, responsive, and precise in their inventory decisions, yet omnichannel inventory management involves more variables and the need for interconnected systems and unified visibility.

If their technology can help retailers be successful during the pressures of peak season, it can help them be more competitive all year.

Omnichannel Inventory Management: Streamlining Complex Operations for Peak Season Success

Omnichannel inventory management can be a balancing act during the stress tests of peak season. Running out of stock leads to missed sales while overstocking results in excess inventory and costly markdowns after the season ends. Retailers must ensure the right amount of product is available across multiple channels—physical stores, online platforms, and distribution centers—to avoid causing bottlenecks or delays, especially with the increased order volume. Customers expect stores to have what they need and to be able to order online with fast, reliable shipping. Unfortunately, they are also short on flexibility, especially as it gets later into December.

Retailers must be prepared with three key capabilities to succeed in this demanding environment.

Unified Inventory Visibility

Unified inventory visibility is the live view of omnichannel inventory. For complex ecosystems, this is not as simple as it seems. Not only are retailers often contending with disparate systems, but these systems also update at different frequencies, which can lead to discrepancies. Dropit approaches this problem by integrating with a retailer’s existing tech stack, for example, the ERP, OMS, POS, etc., synchronizing data from these platforms into a unified data lake. From this, the retailer gets a snapshot of inventory across the entire ecosystem that is accurate at all times.

Enhanced Demand Forecasting

Demand forecasting greatly improves when it is connected to the wealth of information that unified inventory visibility provides. Retailers’ live and historical sales data help reveal market trends and customer behavior patterns, which they can even use for market segmentation. With Dropit, they can anticipate seasonal demand more precisely and rely on machine learning models to refine predictions as new data becomes available.

Streamlined Decision-Making

There is even greater potential with Dropit beyond demand forecasting—improving every allocation, restocking, and returns decision that retailers face. Dropit gives retailers the power of micro-decision-making—continuously improving decisions by responding to the dynamics of their sales across each channel—for the benefit of the ecosystem’s efficiency as a whole. These small, data-driven decisions are the keys to omnichannel inventory optimization—reducing costs and improving revenue.

Optimize Your Inventory Decisions with Dropit

Peak season is when inventory inefficiencies become obvious for retailers, but it also brings the biggest opportunities for growth and profitability. By partnering with Dropit, retailers enable optimized decision-making that takes every sales channel, demand forecast, and granular-level data into account, and position themselves to thrive in peak season and beyond. 

Get the foundation for inventory management success in any season. Contact Dropit today to learn more.