Wholesale businesses buy enormous quantities of commodities directly from manufacturers and resell them to retailers. As a result, your supply chain management is paramount to its success. Despite this, wholesalers have faced difficulties implementing an efficient supply chain to boost sales and turn in more profits. Here are the biggest challenges of the wholesale supply chain and how to resolve them.
Real-Time Inventory Management
One of the best ways to track wholesale businesses is by real-time inventory management, which involves keeping tabs on each sale and purchase using software. This management may help both retailers and manufacturers, but it has its challenges.
Wholesalers are left to figure out how to incorporate real-time inventory information without breaking the bank as both sides demand access to it. It’s impossible to count by hand, and RFID chips are too expensive. How do you resolve this?
Real-time inventory management is worth the investment, even if RFID chips aren’t cost-effective or time-saving. This involves providing your employees and customers with access to real-time inventory data and utilizing it to direct your customers to individualized portals with pricing data particular to them, so they can place orders anytime they want. That order will, of course, update your inventory (in real-time because there is no other way).
Fast Delivery To Retailers
When it comes to delivery, wholesale businesses deal with high expectations from their customers. In addition to losing the retailer’s business, a late or erroneous order from a wholesaler might cost the wholesaler money if they are forced to pay a fee.
As a result, wholesalers are under pressure to cut their rates while also improving the quality of their services. Wholesalers face a massive problem in meeting all of these requirements today.
Fortunately, you can solve this problem by using professional storage solutions for wholesale businesses like K2 storage solutions. They would help reduce storage and delivery issues, especially in locations distant from your producer. They would also increase your delivery speed and provide timely and accurate product information.
Increasing Financial Pressure
Retailers and manufacturers are expediting the purchase and shipping process to eliminate the middleman, which happens to be the wholesale businesses. Retailers are looking to save money, manufacturers are looking to increase profits, and they may be looking at eliminating the middleman.
Many wholesalers lower their pricing and their profits in the near term. This will help retailers stay in business in the short term, but it also comes with its own set of problems. Even after you’ve lowered your pricing, raising your prices again is challenging, and racing to the bottom is a losing strategy.
To effectively combat this issue, you need to find ways to offer value asides from considering the prices. You should work more on logistics, shipping, and product delivery.
Think about what you can do to keep those retail consumers, even if they’re paying a little more money, to win them back or keep them from going elsewhere. Offering a real-time automated inventory system that provides notifications when inventory drops below a predetermined threshold is a popular approach right now.