Opportunities in SME reorder management space?

Discussions
#1

Hey everyone,

I’ve been running a highly successful niche online retail site for the past 2 years … what I find myself constantly battling with is reorder management.

We have a long lead time, so it’s primarily it’s a sales forecasting problem … it takes about 3-4 months from placing the order with our factory in China to delivery. I need to know how many of each SKU to buy. So I want to know how many we sold in the months leading up to it, what our growth forecasts are, how many we have in stock and how long that’s expected to last, how long will we have been sold out for before the stock arrives … if our next order will be in 6 months, what’s the 90% confidence level stock amount.

I’ve built a homegrown tool which does some cool things … but I really think there’s an opportunity here that simple Inventory Management tools like TradeGecko et al aren’t tapping. Anyone else in the same boat?

#2

Have you read this?:

#3

This concept has been in the back of my head since I read that post a while back, @Andy. However, I shyed from trying to implement anything as its really far from my core expertise. Seems like you’re in a good position to make something happen here, @aidan.

#4

Certainly cool to see that other people think there’s a niche there … also agree that not having time to take on something else is the biggest problem!

#5

This is pretty interesting. I spent a good chunk of time looking into inventory forecasting software for the ecommerce company that I work for.

http://www.quora.com/Which-is-the-best-inventory-management-tool-Preferably-a-SaaS-Application

I didn’t really end up finding anything that seemed to fit very well so we’re likely going to build a significant chunk of this ourselves.

I’m pretty involved in the magento community and actually by bootstrapped side project is a magento module.

I think this could make a pretty sweet magento module.

#6

If any of you are serious about building something in this market, I suggest you drop Joannes Vermorel (who wrote the guest post) a line. He is very knowledgeable in this area and might be able to give you some useful pointers.

#7

Thanks @Andy - definitely don’t have the time to work on this right now (shiny objects!), given my MageMail project. But it’s something that I may work on at my day job - but the solution will be very specific to the Magento platform, which is what we use.

#8

These guys just partnered with TradeGecko and look like they provide a lot of what I was looking for:
http://www.lokad.com/salescast-sales-forecasting-software

#9

Looking for something similar. I’m running a subscription business where each customer has a unique subscription. Each subscription consists of common, user-pickable products (inventory of 15, or so, + variants) which get delivered monthly.

Forecasting is a nightmare. For each product there is a minimum (a rather large one, due to custom packaging) I can order, plus the total bill has to exceed a certain amount. This means my stock of product A might be running low but it’s not enough to exceed the minimum amount. I can either wait, or add product B, which I currently don’t need but will be able to sell in the future, to the invoice.

Picking the right product B and optimising reorder times and quantities could be a huge win. Everything I’ve come across so far seems a bit too corporate-y.