Inventory Management for Retailers: The Art of Making the Most of Your Stock

In stock management, the retailer faces a considerable challenge. If you had only one product to sell, managing your stock would be easy, but with thousands of products available to consumers, you have no choice but to offer variety.

Products are relevant and profitable insofar as they meet the needs of your customers. Only a systematic analysis of sales figures, gross profit margins, inventory levels, and returns on inventory investment will determine whether this is the case. As you look over your store displays, one by one, you need to ask yourself a key question for each product you see there: DOES THIS PRODUCT BELONG IN MY STORE?

Whatever our ideas about sales, purchasing, and marketing, we must first acknowledge the fundamental need for profitability. Throughout this course, we will examine the factors influencing the profitability of each of your products by considering the dynamics of inventory management.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
In over 25 years of consulting, Camille D. Roberge has analyzed and improved the layout and displays of more than 1500 stores, for both independent retailers and national chains. Thanks to his advice, his clients have increased sales by 5 to 31 percent on average. He is also an experienced speaker and an accomplished trainer: over 350 000 people have benefited from the more than 2000 workshops and talks he has given all over North America. 
In this book, he shares his considerable expertise with you. 

TOP RETAILERS SERIES
"VInventory Management for Retailers – The Art of Making the Most of Your Stock " is part of the "Top Retailers Series". We offer a great variety of books on retailing in French and English. Simply search on Amazon for "Top Retailers Series" or "Collection Top Commerce".

CONTENT
In Chapter 1, we will discuss the need for stock management, the universal laws that govern its application, and how those principles apply specifically to your store. We will also analyze your sales and your inventory levels.

In Chapter 2, we will take a look at the origin and purpose of profit margins, and we will see how to calculate an average margin and what can make it fluctuate. Then we will see how to determine profit margins for specific departments or product categories.

We will discuss sales, profit margins, and inventory levels in Chapter 3 and see how their analysis reveals the stock turnover rate for each of your product categories and for your entire store.

In Chapter 4, we will evaluate the return on investment for each product category and the influence of stock turnover on profitability. 

Now that we have gathered all the pertinent information, we will be able to plan purchasing budgets in Chapter 5, using monthly sales budgets and resulting stock-to-sales ratios as our basis.

In Chapter 6, we will consider a series of questions in order to probe the real value of special offers or “deals.”

Finally, Chapter 7 will deal with stock controls and the need for frequent physical inventories to monitor stock movement and avoid inventory losses.