To maintain inventory balance, retailers rely on Transfer Orders (TOs) for stock movement across locations.
Whether it’s restocking a store, moving extra stock to high-demand locations, or returning unsold items to a warehouse, TOs help ensure inventory is available where needed most. Some stores might run out of popular items without a good inventory transfer system, while others have too many. TOs help solve this problem, ensuring products are always available where customers need them while preventing stock shortages and excess inventory.
Inventory Transfer That Helps Retailers Manage Stock
Retailers use TOs to move inventory where it’s needed most. Common types of TOs include:
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Warehouse-to-Store Inventory Transfers: Restock stores by sending inventory from a central warehouse.
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Store-to-Store Inventory Transfers: Shift products between stores based on demand.
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Store-to-Warehouse Inventory Transfers: Return unsold, seasonal, or damaged items to the warehouse.
Inventory Transfer Challenges Retailers Face
Moving inventory from warehouse to store is simple at first, there are only a handful of locations, and all eCommerce orders are being fulfilled from the warehouse with stores only handling walk-in customers. As long as retailers have an inventory control system like an ERP or a simple inventory management system, for their central operations, stores can mostly get away without any real inventory management system. Stores are notified about upcoming inventory using messages on Slack and a spreadsheet attachment. If inventory needs to be moved around, stores can just call each other to find inventory nearby and get it shipped overnight for a customer to pick up.
As the number of retail locations surpasses 10 stores, retailers begin to offer pickup in-store or ship from stores to reduce shipping cost, suddenly their simple inventory control system starts to show its cracks. Turning away walk-in customers due to stock-outs, doing multiple restocks per week for the same product, or revealing long-lost inventory from periodic cycle counts are all indications that it’s time to consider a real inventory management solution for your stores that has robust inventory transfer capabilities.
What an Inventory Transfer System Can Do
A real inventory transfer system will help retailers solve stockouts, prevent inventory shrinkage in transit, and reduce the overall number of transfer orders performed every week.
Inventory management solutions with robust inventory transfer functions should look at demands for products at all locations to help predict where you’ll need more inventory and where it’s lying dormant. By forecasting stockouts using sales velocity from both online and in-store sales and other dimensions, retailers are able to preemptively plan store to store transfers with cheaper shipping methods and more product in one transfer.
When stores use a single system to ship and receive inventory transfer, retailers are also able to much more easily reconcile how much inventory one location and arrived at the destination. An inventory management solution for stores will be able to help you find mispicks and receiving discrepancies, making it easier to find operational friction points and keep systemic inventory accurate.
At the end of the day, nobody wants to have to transfer inventory. Retailers already paid to ship their inventory from their warehouse to their stores once and any additional shipping of that inventory is a hit to their margin. The best thing a strong inventory transfer solution can do for you is to reduce the number of transfer orders you perform. To do this effectively, however, it needs a lot more data than what a standalone inventory management solution really has. Traditionally an inventory management solution has a record of your current inventory levels and helps you operate on it, but to intelligently reduce the number of transfers, it needs access to much more data, from walk-in vs ship from store demand, inventory discrepancies during fulfillment, return rates and reasons and markdown rates. While an inventory management solution alone doesn’t have this information, HotWax Commerce integrates its Store Inventory Management solution with its OMS to do just that.
Merging Inventory Transfer with an OMS
HotWax Inventory Management Suite for stores has the benefit of leveraging the order management data as well. By leveraging the omnichannel nature of the OMS’s data it’s able to make far more useful recommendations for inventory planning that help retailers perform transfers more easily but also do fewer transfer orders.
In addition to helping retailers streamline their transfer orders, they also get the benefit of leveraging the OMS’s powerful routing engine to automatically allocate store-to-store transfers to the best location based on all of the same rules they’d use to fulfill a sales order. Parameters like distance, inventory safety stock, demand and more let retailers make sure that when transfers are needed, they are acted upon quickly without requiring manual interventions and customers get the product they want on time.
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Simplifying Inventory Transfer for Retailers
A well-organized inventory transfer system helps retailers keep stock balanced across locations, preventing shortages and excess inventory. By replacing manual processes with automated solutions like the HotWax Commerce Inventory Management Suite, retailers can improve overall fulfillment and store operations. Want to see how an optimized inventory transfer flow works? Check out HotWax Commerce’s inventory transfer workflow to improve stock movement across your stores and warehouses.
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