A Smarter Way to Manage Excess Inventory | INTURN6 min read

A Smarter Way to Manage Excess Inventory | INTURN6 min read

Reading Time: 5 minutes

We all know the costs associated with excess inventory are high enough to put a strain on a business’s revenue. Today, the process of getting rid of this excess inventory is a time-consuming, cumbersome process involving multiple people, spreadsheets, and back-and-forth communication. This can be a draining process, especially when dealing with large quantities of stock. 

So, what’s the alternative?

Using a smart excess inventory solution that can automate most of your workload. This is exactly what Vue.ai’s excess inventory management tool, INTURN, does. It gives brands a comprehensive view of their inventory and allows them to sell it off-price to specific retailers enabling them to maximize recovery while minimizing operational costs.

INTURN – A smart excess inventory management solution

INTURN makes life easier for both sellers and buyers by providing a single dashboard with which they can send out offers to each other and negotiate on price, quantity, and more.

Now, a regular excess inventory sale process looks something like this:

1 – Data is incomplete and difficult to collect: Gathering key information around product attributes, quantities, pricing, as well as high-quality images in order to curate an assortment offer to potential buyers is a cumbersome process. 

2 – Manual processes are not scalable: Teams need to navigate a tedious negotiation process that involves manually tracking and adjusting product quantities, pricing information, attaching images, and more across spreadsheets, emails, and phone calls with buyers.

3 – Negotiating requires a lot of back-and-forth communication: Sellers and buyers typically communicate over emails or phone calls multiple times before deciding to go through with a purchase.

4 – Reviewing competing offers is slow and inefficient: Since offer creation and negotiation is manual and time-consuming, teams have difficulty evaluating several competing offers and determining which buyer is providing the best deal.

But with INTURN, all of this is automated and made accessible through a single dashboard.

How does INTURN work?

Managing excess inventory using INTURN can be broken down into 3 main steps:

1 – Upload and organize your inventory: All you need to do is upload all the spreadsheets that have excess inventory data into the INTURN dashboard. The tool then automatically centralizes your excess inventory into a comprehensive database, providing you with full visibility into all product data and images. You can easily search, sort, analyze and update your inventory in real-time to reflect true inventory levels and avoid over-selling.

2 – Curate offers for select buyers: The dashboard contains the full inventory details, from the kind of products to the number of units held in different sizes. This makes it easier for you to curate inventory assortments and strategically price discounted offers for specific buyers, in a fraction of the time. You can also control the level of negotiation that the buyer(s) can do as well as set deadlines for each offer to drive urgency. Additionally, products in allocated and accepted offers are removed from the excess inventory portal to avoid over-selling.

3 – Negotiate and finalize offers: The offers you create are sent out via email to the specific buyers who can then login into the dashboard easily to view the offer. You and the buyers can easily negotiate prices, sizes, quantities, and more in the dashboard to finally arrive at an offer that works for both parties. If needed, you can also chat using the dashboard regarding specific products, making it easier to keep track of all conversations in one place.

That’s all. Three steps to eliminate the need for spreadsheets and multiple back-and-forth emails. 

Why INTURN?

INTURN offers businesses key features that really help them make the most out of the tool. It is designed to remove pain points in the negotiation process of selling excess inventory. 

Flexible Negotiation Settings – As a seller, it is up to you to determine the level of flexibility that you can provide to buyers when sending out offers. INTURN offers 4 levels of negotiation settings that you can choose from for each offer. To understand this better let’s consider an example – you are sending out an offer containing 100 units each of 2 types of jeans and 2 sweaters. Now, you can choose

• Take-all or nothing offer: The buyer has to either take all the products you have put out in the offer or choose to not take up the offer at all. That means all 400 units (across the 2 jeans and 2 sweaters).
• Category offer: The buyer can choose to take just the 2 types of jeans and reject the sweaters. But they have to take all the sizes and quantities mentioned in the offer.
• Category or quantity offer: The buyer can choose to take certain categories and certain quantities of the product, i.e., they can say they will take up only 50 units of both sweaters and choose to not take up jeans at all. The 50 units that are being allocated will be evenly distributed among all the sizes that are available.
• Maximum flexibility offer: The buyer can choose the products, sizes, and quantities completely. For example, here they can choose to take 20 units of sizes S & M alone in both sweaters and choose to take 30 units of size M in both jeans.

Truckload settings: You can also choose to set conditions for the number of truckloads that a buyer must purchase for an offer to be viable – to ensure that your transportation and fuel costs are worth the revenue you are getting from the sale.

The buyers can also choose to negotiate on price for any of these offers if you allow it while sending out the offer.

Other features that INTURN supports:

• Smart Upload: The tool’s configurator automatically maps uploaded inventory to existing attribute fields and creates a centralized view of your inventory. 
• Comprehensive Views: The comprehensive database provides you with full visibility into all product data including attributes, price, etc along with product images. 
• Automatic Assortment Allocation: The tool automatically assorts equal amounts of units in different sizes for the same product during offer allocation.
• Buyer Dashboard: The tool allows buyers to create a separate account with separate fields for easy negotiation on price, quantity, size, etc, eliminating the need for emails or phone calls.
• Automatic Margin Calculation: The tool allows your buyers to automatically calculate the margin that they can make by selling these products.
• Price Quotation: The tool allows you to automatically calculate selling prices, optimized to get the most out of each unit or product.

As a leader in supply chain visibility, INTURN offers solutions that empower teams to proactively optimize existing overstock to maximize recovery. We’ve partnered with leading brands across industries worldwide, each with its own set of unique challenges to solve. If your organization is also struggling with managing excess inventory and wants to solve these challenges then get in touch with us!

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