For all enterprises, regardless of size, the transition between Autumn, Spring, Summer, and Winter will bring in an array of extra stock. While this is excellent for attracting all-year-round custom, the last thing you want is to be stuck with Halloween stock when it’s approaching Christmas.
However, this might be easier for household-name retailers with expansive warehouses. Still, smaller traders must be much more careful when increasing their stock, which is why flexible storage solutions are vital.
There comes a time when using your friends/family members’ garages, spare rooms, or stacking boxes floor to ceiling isn’t going to cut it anymore. To help the owners of SMEs prepare, we’ve outlined several tips for storing season items during the off-season below.
Consider Outsourcing Storage
Suppose you’re tired of seeing your spare room filled with boxes full of seasonal stock for your retail business. In that case, it might be time to consider outsourcing a self-storage facility to resolve your seasonal storage problems.
Round-the-clock monitoring, spotlessly clean premises, protection from the elements, and flexibility – the benefits of self-storage facilities are too good to ignore. Admittedly you will have to pay a reoccurring fee, but compared to the cost of a commercial premise, it will be much less, and you won’t have to pay for utilities either!
Discover more about the benefits of self-storage facilities by visiting the sites of providers like North West Storage Solutions, who offer over ten-thousand pallet locations across the North West of England.
Stack It Safely
If you are fortunate enough to have sold most of your seasonal stock and only have a handful of boxes to store, your best option might be to keep it in one of the backrooms of your retail premises. But it’s how you do this that is important.
When presented with an empty room and lots of boxes, your initial instinct might be to start filling space outwardly, when in reality, the best way to maximise available space is by stacking vertically. We’re not telling you to stock boxes floor to ceiling, as they could become unsteady and cause bodily injury to you or one of your employees; instead, aim for waist height and stack from the heaviest to the lightest.
If you’d like to make it a little more aesthetically pleasing, you could consider investing in shelving or racking, which will give you more freedom when storing seasonal stock, with lockable, moving ladders to help you assess higher levels.
Monitor Seasonal Stock
You can’t begin to store seasonal stock without controlling it first. To manage seasonal inventory, SMEs must track key performance indicators; backorder rate, stockout, inventory turnover, and daily merchandise sales.
Doing so will enable you to predict product demand and order in adequate stock to fulfil customer orders without overordering and incurring extra charges.
One of the most popular ways to control seasonal inventory is by implementing a warehouse management system, which can help SMEs control changes in product turnover, reduce errors, monitor product traceability and many other benefits.