Financial Resource

One of the challenges associated with building sales when opening a dollar store is maintaining adequate levels of inventory without breaking the back to purchase everything.  If you are working to grow your store sales, get creative and you won’t need to invest so much in inventory for your store.  In this article I present tactic to minimize inventory while building sales when opening a dollar store.  Read on to discover how easy it is.

Here’s a simple and very straightforward tactic to use in your store.  Simply place smaller, more frequent orders of merchandise for your store.  In essence using this tactic allows you turn your suppliers into your warehouse.  Where a competitor might be complete large monthly orders for the very same merchandise, they are forcing themselves to carry a full month of inventory.  You on the other hand have only one-week of inventory in-stock.  Basically you have only 25% of the money tied up in inventory following this tactic.

If you are opening a dollar store there are some cautions to be acknowledged.  First, following this strategy requires more time on your part.  In addition to adding extra time receiving and displaying smaller weekly orders, you are also faced with the extra time to order and schedule delivery of the merchandise.  Next, there is a real risk of running out of important consumable items, which is a real turnoff to customers.  You must understand usage and establish the right safety stock levels to minimize this risk.

Smaller orders can also mean higher per-pallet shipping costs.  There are steps to minimize this risk.  One very effective method is to guarantee that you will have one or two pallets on a shipper’s truck every week.   Finally there is the important risk that your supplier will run out of core consumables and other hot products. Following the weekly order process means you may lose sales of those key products whenever this happens.

On the other hand there are some real advantages to following this strategy. First of all, following this process means there will be a constantly (Weekly if managed correctly.) inflow of new merchandise coming into your store.  As shoppers get accustomed to weekly arrivals they will start coming in on the designated day to examine the new arrivals.  Next little or no back-stock is required using this tactic.  Anything in back-stock is money you have tied up and yet it is not really saleable until it is moved to the sales floor.  In essence you have turned your supplier into your warehouse.

A huge advantage of ordering weekly is that it reduces the risk you will have huge quantities of merchandise that will not sell.  Poor selling merchandise is hard to liquidate, and those items typically add nothing to the profitability of your store.

If you are opening a dollar store give this tactic a try.  Once you develop a smooth system for weekly ordering and handling of merchandise, you will find you have much less money invested in inventory, yet your sales will grow.

To your dollar store business success!

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