Is the image quality comparable? How about the number of images and views of the product? Descriptions

Product imagery can make or break a sale, so compare the images of slow moving inventory to those of more popular items. When visitors do find the items on your website, how do they look? Make sure that all items can be easily found, including through your internal site search tool, and try moving any slow moving items to the forefront on category pages, or even as a featured product on your homepage. With big ecommerce catalogs, it’s not uncommon that certain items don’t sell simply because they can’t be easily found by using the site’s main navigation, or they’re buried well below other products. Can website visitors even find the items? The first thing to look at is your website. Here are a few things to look at before you start cutting prices…. Before you do that, though, I recommend you evaluate your marketing efforts, which may be a big part of the reason that the merchandise isn’t selling. The most common method for dealing with it is to slash the price. Therefore, it’s important for any online seller to come up with a plan of attack for dealing with merchandise that is slow moving. Slow moving inventory takes up valuable warehouse space and ties up capital. Then, the next step is figuring out what to do with it. Once you’ve determined how you will define SMI, you can then set up processes and procedures for monitoring it. It is up to the merchant to determine the thresholds, but by looking at frequency of shipment, it allows sellers to truly identify inventory that is slow moving, as opposed to inventory that may simply be overstocked or which turns slow due to large order quantities. For instance, it may be that 10 items or less shipped over a 60 day period defines slow moving inventory. The ratio of shipped items to days may vary. For example, if you ship zero items of a particular stock keeping unit (SKU) over a certain period of time, such as 90 or 120 days, then it is considered slow moving. The method I like most for defining slow moving inventory is looking at the frequency of shipment. So, it’s important to account for per unit purchasing costs when using stock turns to define slow moving inventory, and it’s unreasonable to expect high stock turns when ordering in large quantities to minimize your per unit cost.

When ordering in large quantities, however, it will have the effect of slowing stock turns. When ordering new inventory, as quantity increases, the cost per unit generally decreases. This isn’t necessarily a bad strategy, as a higher stock turn ratio is generally better, but it’s important to account for order quantity. Other retailers look at stock turns when defining SMI. While this can be one way to define slow moving inventory, it’s really the definition of being overstocked, and it doesn’t take into account the frequency of shipment. As a general rule, some companies define SMI as having less than 6 months of demand for any given item over a period of 12 months.

Peachtree inventory writedown