Staying Ahead of the Game
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Managing inventory in a garden center comes with many unique challenges. One of the biggest challenges is that the sector is highly seasonal. People are doing most of their planting in the spring and early summer, with diminishing demand throughout the year. In addition, many items have their own seasonality, and they might be in demand for a few weeks or less. In addition to seasonality, much of a garden center’s inventory is perishable, which means that it is best delivered shortly before it is sold.
The sales environment for garden centers can also be highly variable, alternate between bulk orders from commercial clients and small orders from individuals working in their home gardens.
However, these challenges are manageable if you follow some of these inventory management best practices for garden centers.
Use Previous Years’ Numbers to Predict Current Demand
One of the best ways to predict how much inventory you need and when is to look at sales in previous years. This will tell you what type of plants and supplies people in your area tend to buy and when.
To do this successfully, you need to have definitive sales numbers from the previous year, at least. The more years of sales records that you have, the more reliable they will be, making it easier to accurately forecast this year’s demand.
Use this number as a starting point for your orders and inventory needs, but be prepared to modify them.
Pay Attention to Trends
Paying attention to trends can help you refine your inventory to maximize sales and minimize waste. When planting, people often establish a routine that they tend to follow year after year, but sometimes a new trend will come along that can inspire people to modify that routine. When you see increased or decreased interest in particular types of plants, modify your stock to anticipate the change.
Where do these trends come from? It used to be that TV and magazines were the main source of these trends, but now social media is typically the source of many trends in gardening. Make sure you’re monitoring the popular platforms in your area.
One benefit of social media is that it gives you an opportunity to influence local trends. If you develop an audience, you can promote inventory that you are trying to move.
Have a Single Inventory Management System for All Locations
If your garden center has multiple locations, you need to make sure that your inventory management system covers them all. You need a system that updates all locations simultaneously and in real time.
It’s important to make sure that you aren’t committed to selling more merchandise than you have access to. This means keeping close track of every item with a system that incorporates both manual counts and sales data.
Keep Inventory Nimble
To reduce the risk of spoilage and loss, it’s important to have a nimble inventory management system. This means ordering items as close as possible to the moment you expect to sell them. Having nimble inventory means working with suppliers who can deliver items quickly and reliably.
Price Flexibly
Flexible pricing is a tool that can help you deal with the challenges of garden center inventory management. Being able to raise your prices when demand is high can help you capture maximum revenue, while dropping prices when demand decreases can move old stock to make room for new inventory.
Having a garden center POS system that facilitates flexible pricing will help you remain profitable despite the fickle nature of customer demand.
Use Your POS System as the Backbone of Your Inventory Management
Using your garden center POS system for inventory management makes it easier to access inventory at the consoles where you are dealing with customers. This will allow you to confidently quote inventory and close definitive.
Mariner Business Solutions Can Help Your Garden Center Grow
If you are looking for a POS system that can help your garden center face inventory challenges, GreenPoint is an optimal choice. Built around NCR’s powerful inventory engine and Counterpoint’s point-of-sale software, Mariner Business Solutions’ GreenPoint system delivers optimal inventory functionality. It lets you manage merchandise at multiple locations, including alerts about potential fraud or shrinkage. GreenPoint also makes flexible pricing easy, including allowing personalized and stackable discounts. It also gives you all the reports that you need to use information from previous years to plan this year’s orders.
You’ll get additional benefits from working with Mariner Business Solutions, too, thanks to our Personal Advantage Plus™ Approach. This approach means that we:
- Collaborate with your team to understand your unique goals
- Make customized recommendations that ensure the solutions you get match your current situation and goals
- Deliver custom configurations and integrations that enhance your current operations and workflow
- Offer true human support to help you get the most out of your system
- Show up on-site to help when issues arise
- Deliver uptime reliability
- Provide detailed and personalized reporting
- Offer competitive innovations to meet your evolving needs over time
Want to see how our service can make a big difference for your garden center?
Contact us to learn more at (303) 692 – 8200.
Key Reporting Tools to Increase Your Garden Center’s Profitability
Knowledge is power, and accurate reporting tools can give you the power to improve your garden center’s profitability. If you are considering any inventory management system (IMS), including one integrated with a point of sale (POS) system, you need to make sure that it has tools that will help you make the most of your opportunities.
Here are just a few of the tools that Mariner Business Solutions’ GreenPoint garden center POS offers to help your garden center get and remain profitable.
Profit Margin Reports
Your profit margin is key to your profitability. Many retailers start with the same markup across the board, making the gross margin the same for every item. However, many factors could divert the profitability of an item from the common strategy. Slow sales might have forced you to discount items because they aren’t moving. Market research might have shown that your competitors are selling an item for much less. Or shrinkage/divergence might have caused inventory loss.
Profit margin reporting can help you determine which items are your most profitable so you can refine your inventory and marketing to improve their sales, improving your overall profitability. If these reports show that your profit margins are insufficient across the board, you’ll have the data you need to revise your markup strategy and ensure you are profitable.
Revenue Growth
As your business grows, so will your expenses. If you want to remain profitable, it’s important to make sure your revenue growth is outpacing or at least matching the growth of your expenses.
Looking at revenue growth year over year and month over month can help you assess the wisdom of certain decisions. Did hiring more staff help you increase earnings? What about your new advertising strategy? Are all days earning equally? Perhaps there are days when a reduced staff might be justified. It might even make sense to be closed. These types of decisions get much easier when you have hard data to base them on.
Inventory Turnover
Inventory turnover is an important factor in maintaining profitability. If you can’t turn inventory over fast enough, you might face serious problems that can decrease your profits, such as:
- Spoilage
- Depreciation
- Seasonality expires
- Clogged warehouse or other storage space
- Sunk cost, potentially with interest
- Not looking fresh to customers
Garden center inventory can often spoil, so it’s important to keep it moving. Even items that don’t spoil per se can see their value go down if they sit around your shop or warehouse for a long time. They may go out of season. In addition, these unsold items will clog up your warehouse or other storage space, which is a cost drag on your business. The sunk cost you put into the items that aren’t selling can also limit your operating budget, especially if you financed the purchase and are now paying interest on the funds.
Finally, having the same merchandise on your shelves week after week, month after month, can make your store look old and stale to customers.
Looking at the turnover rate of different inventory can help you make better purchasing decisions in the future.
Customer Loyalty Programs and Notes
Customer loyalty programs can significantly improve your profitability if they’re done correctly. Discounts often drive people to join and maintain membership in loyalty programs. Monitoring your customers’ behavior can help you offer them discounts that are not just good deals, but also deals that will make your customers happy.
Monitoring customer loyalty programs and cross-referencing them with profit and revenue reports can help you understand whether your programs are profitable or if your discounts are too severe, making them a net loss for your garden center.
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Get Powerful Reporting to Grow Your Garden Center’s Profitability
If you are looking for an IMS that includes powerful reports to make your garden center more profitable, Mariner Business Solutions can help. Our GreenPoint garden center POS system is built around the industry-leading Counterpoint POS with NCR’s powerful inventory engine. This lets you track all your inventory across numerous locations and update sales in real time, even if you are also making online sales.
In addition, you’ll benefit from Mariner Business Solutions’ Personal Advantage Plus™ Approach. This improves your experience with the POS system through:
- Extensive collaboration with your team so we can facilitate your goals
- Customized recommendations to achieve your goals
- Configurations and integrations that adapt the system to your operations and workflow
- Human support when you need it
- On-site response when necessary
- Uptime reliability
- Help configuring reporting
- Ongoing innovations so your system continues to improve
Want to find out how GreenPoint’s reporting can improve your profitability? Request a demo and we will show you what it can do.
