Creating an Organized At-Home Business

If you have a knack for sewing, painting, woodworking, or countless other artistic expressions, you have the ability to start and run a business from your home. There are countless websites that provide the basic infrastructure for amateur designers to run a business online. As a designer, all you have to do is create the products. If you are thinking of starting a business of this nature or already have one in place, you have likely considered the idea of inventory. If you’re not planning to create every item to order, you will need to accurately keep track of your inventory in order to prevent customer frustration, stay on top of what you need to add to your store, and ultimately effectively run your business.

Given the popularity of online stores run from the comfort of home, there is a certain expectation regarding how the stores are managed. Of course, it’s easy to discern whether you are ordering from a large corporation or an independent seller. Despite this, as a small scale designer, you are still expected to run a professional store that accurately and efficiently meets customer needs. The fact that you are running a one person shop doesn’t change these requirements.

Listening to Your Customers

In order to successfully run a business, you have to listen to your customers. While the idea behind your business is highly personal, if you merely produce what you desire without gathering any insight from your target audience, you could quickly find that you are not making the profits you desire to make from your business. You don’t have to blatantly ask customers and potential customers for their opinions. This may not net the response you desire. Rather, you can use less invasive tactics like reviewing the number of page views a given item receives, or the number of orders you receive for one of your products. This passive approach means that people don’t have to actively tell you anything. You simply have to listen to the analytics. Once you get an idea of what your audience wants, you can use inventory softwarelike Asset Panda's mobile app to make sure you keep your store stocked with your best sellers.

When you use inventory management software,you can plan your work around what is lacking in your inventory. You don’t want to advertise a product as being available and not have it in stock. If it takes you three weeks to create a product and a person orders it thinking you have it in stock, you could lose customer. This would all be based on your lack of knowledge about your own store’s stock.

Adjust Your Products Based on What Sells

If you enjoy making a specific type of beaded necklace, but it does not sell, it serves your business little purpose if you stockpile your inventory with the product. It could take many months to move just a few of the products, and in that time, you’re not making any money. A better approach is to keep your inventory filled with what sells. You want to make sure that your top sellers are always in stock. Using inventory management software keeps you on top of this information.

Beyond keeping track of this information, you also need a way of physically organizing the items in your inventory. No one will be visiting your store in person, so theoretically you could keep your inventory in a disheveled manner. But, you can save yourself confusion by keeping all of your physical products organized based on the information you compile in your tracking software.