Organize eCommerce Stock and Track Sales

eCommerce focused on the sales, stock receiving, and counting processes that drive good small business inventory management. But this discussion is incomplete without looking at ways to keep all of that stock organized and readily accessible.

Whether you have a retail store with a small stockroom in the back or an expansive warehouse for your ecommerce business, organization is key to smart inventory management. Even if you operate in a tiny space, it’s good to have organized overstock space so you can take advantage of discounts and deals on quantity purchases.

Tracking sales is a must for any eCommerce business operation and it involves more than just tallying up the totals at the end of the day. A good small business inventory management system also records every order in detail, including each item sold. With a manual system, you’ll record orders by hand or track them within a spreadsheet, then manually adjust the inventory quantities for each item sold.

A small operation can handle this manually as long as inventory reductions are tracked regularly, say at the close of each business day. But as you grow, a POS system will dramatically streamline your operation by automating your inventory reduction with every sale. That means every time you make a sale, each item sold is automatically removed from your inventory records. Plus, each recorded sale lists each item sold. It’s all very tidy.

Inventory management touches many parts of your eCommerce business. When you forgo management, you can’t forecast sales. You can’t efficiently get items to customers when they need them.

It prevents overselling. When inventory isn’t tracked, it can lead to you incorrectly listing available inventory on your site or marketplace. Nothing is worse than telling a customer you can’t ship an item they bought because you actually don’t have it

Whatever your inventory storage method, your stored inventory needs to be well-organized, clearly labeled, and accessible for pulling and inventory counts. This can be done using the boxes goods come in, stacking bins, or even hanging separators for hung apparel. Periodic cycle counts of overstock also help keep track of extra inventory and ensure it’s not lost or misplaced over time.

How Tax Holiday Can Help Your Business

Sales tax holidays are especially common. Typically, they involve suspending the collection of sales tax on a particular day of the year in order to encourage consumers to buy certain items and help local businesses.

For example, many cities have a tax holiday during the back-to-school season in order to encourage people to shop and to help parents pay less for school supplies.

Tax holidays can take many forms, though. Governments sometimes create tax holidays for new businesses. Developing countries might create tax holidays for foreign companies that relocate to the host country. The overarching idea is to lower the cost of doing business in an effort to encourage economic activity.
Why it Matters:

The facts are that internet sales—the majority of which continue to be tax-free—have enjoyed double digit sales growth virtually every year out of the last 15. At the same time, sales at our local stores have been essentially flat after inflation. This is why those who want more taxes to spend have lamented limited sales tax revenue growth. The truth is that the sales tax is virtually 100% avoidable.

Sales tax holidays are supposed to boost business and relieve shoppers, but they are underpublicized, damningly complex and easily manipulated.

Although taxing authorities lose out on tax revenue during a tax holiday, many economists believe that tax holidays actually increase tax revenue over the long term because they help businesses stay in business or grow. Over time, this creates more taxable revenue for the taxing authority and even more tax revenue in the form of payroll and other taxes if those businesses retain or hire employees.

Importance and Benefits of Exports in an Economy

Exports play an important role in economy, influencing the level of economic growth, employment and the balance of payments. If exports increase at a faster pace as compared to imports, nothing can stop an economy from being a developed one. On the other hand, the instability in exports can adversely affects the process of economic development.

Lower exports mean low foreign exchange and lower foreign exchange in turn means a small purchasing capacity of a nation in the international market.

Fluctuations in export earnings introduce uncertainties in an economy. These uncertainties influence economic behavior by adversely affecting the level and efficiency of investment and in turn have a negative effect on growth.

Businesses generally strive to make profits and the bigger the profits the better. In many instances, exports can contribute to increased profits because the average orders from international customers are often larger than they are from domestic buyers, as importers generally order by the container instead of by the pallet (thereby affecting both total sales and total profits). Some products - especially those that are unique or very innovative in nature may also command greater profit margins abroad than in the local market.

 Exports help to put idle production capacity to work. This is generally achieved the more efficient utilisation of the existing factory, machines and staff. What is more, because you are now selling more products without increasing total costs to the same extent, this has the effect of lowering your unit costs which represents a more productive overall operation. Lower unit costs make a product more competitive in the local marketplace as well as in foreign markets, and/or can contribute to the firm's overall profitability.

The concept of trade stability or instability may be based either on a country’s aggregate trade in comparison with the cost of the world or on a binary country pair comparison. Such binary pairs may be large depending upon the number of trading allies.

Export instabilities have been claimed to affect economic growth both positively and negatively. Fluctuation in exports earnings introduces uncertainties in the economy. Supply side policies could include both interventionist supply side policies (such as education and training) and market oriented supply side policies (e.g. reducing the power of trades unions, reducing government regulation). This can enable increased productivity.

Private sector innovation. There is only so much the government can do to promote private sector productivity. Competitiveness depends on new technology and management techniques as much as any government policies

With increased export production and sales, you can achieve economies of scale and spread costs over a larger volume of revenue. You reduce average unit costs and increase overall profitability and competitiveness. Long-term exports may enable a company to expand its production facilities in order to achieve an economic level of production.