Gardening is a popular hobby across the country, and that popularity is only growing. It’s a great time to own a garden center — but a green thumb and friendly staff aren’t all you need to make it successful.
If customers come in and can’t find what they’re looking for, they’ll likely go somewhere else which is why managing garden center inventory effectively is so important, even though you’ll face seasonal fluctuations and other unique challenges.
Fortunately, with the right software and best practices, you can get a handle on your inventory in no time.
The Unique Challenge of Managing Garden Center Stock
Optimizing inventory levels is important for every retailer, but it can be particularly challenging for garden center staff because of these factors:
- Seasonal: The garden industry is highly seasonal, creating fluctuations in stock and demand for certain items.
- Perishable: In addition to general tools and supplies, garden centers sell a variety of perishable plants, vegetables, and more that need to be carefully tracked.
- Specialized: With a wide variety of plants, fertilizers, and planters, it’s important to have a full understanding of each item to optimally store, sell, and arrange them.
- Spread out: Many garden centers need ways to manage inventory that’s spread out between stores, warehouses, grow sites, and greenhouses.
These hurdles grow higher as garden centers get more popular, open new locations, or track inventory by hand.
Garden Center Inventory: 5 Steps to Success
Garden center inventory management can be challenging, but leveraging the right tools and best practices makes it easier.
Here are five simple, cost-effective tips to better manage your garden center inventory.
1. Simplify Processes With Inventory Management Software
With so much to keep track of, manual inventory tracking isn’t the best option for your garden center, since it’s easy to make data entry errors or lose track of stock levels as items are sold.
Instead, use inventory management software to simplify your processes and get a real-time view of inventory levels. Inventory management software makes it easy to scan or batch enter items into the system as they arrive, then track stock levels as they’re sold on your point of sale (POS) system.
Using an inventory management solution, you can instantly tell customers whether something is in stock and avoid stockouts or overstocks.
2. Use Serialized Inventory Tracking for Tools and Machinery
Having varied stock is important to keep customers coming back year-round. If you offer gardening tools and yard equipment, like mowers or leaf blowers, you’ll need to keep track of each one you sell.
Your best option is to track the barcode or serial number on the item, which is why it’s important to use an inventory management system that tracks the status of serialized inventory.
Serialized inventory management is also important if you offer rentals, since you can track the status and condition of each item.
3. Set Low Stock Alerts To Prevent Stockouts
Imagine it’s early spring. The weather is turning warmer, and you get a massive influx of customers who are ready to get planting. Business is great — but as you get busier, you might not notice that you’re running out of potting soil or your most popular pepper plants.
Sound familiar? It’s hard to keep track of inventory levels, especially during busy seasons. Avoid stockouts by setting a restock alert on your POS system. This will automatically notify you the minute you’re running low, so you can quickly set up a purchase order.
If your POS system has built-in vendor management, this will further simplify your restocking process by keeping all of your supplier information in one place.
Related Read: 6 Garden Center Marketing Strategies To Grow Your Business ASAP
4. Understand Customers, Trends, and More Using Reports
Successful garden centers are built on expertise; you need staff that know their peonies from their roses. But it’s not realistic for staff to know everything about the business, like when the busiest hours are, what types of plants are most popular, or when demand for certain items might surge next.
Luckily, they don’t have to. Every time you put something in inventory or make a sale, your POS system generates tons of valuable data that you can put into context using reports. Reporting and analytics tools give you invaluable insights that can help you optimize inventory, like:
- Bestselling items and product categories
- Peak hours and seasons
- Most popular item by season
- Inventory churn rate
- Sources of shrink
- Profit margins
You can also combine this data with external factors like events, holidays, or even the weather for demand forecasting. Demand forecasting will help you discover patterns in customer behavior that will help you plan ahead.
The reports on your POS system can also help you optimize your store layout. If you see that a particular item sold well one year but not another, you might choose to move it to another part of the greenhouse.
5. Leverage Custom Barcodes and Labels
Another aspect that makes managing garden center inventory so difficult is variation. The price of a plant might change depending on if it’s being sold alone, pre-potted, or part of a batch.
But as they say, variety is the spice of life — so how can you offer variety without the headache?
Leverage custom barcodes and labels to make selling any type of item easy. With a modern POS system, you can print off labels and barcodes in multiple styles that can be scanned and rung up easily at checkout.
This gives you more flexibility to track inventory no matter what form it takes without added complexity.
Related Read: How We Use a Mobile Inventory App: 3 Strategies for Success
H2: Optimize Your Garden Center Inventory Management With Comcash
Optimizing your inventory isn’t just more convenient for staff, it’s a vital part of increasing sales, cutting overhead costs, and boosting customer satisfaction. Garden center inventory management software ensures you’ll always have popular items in stock while providing you more visibility into your business operations.
If you want to improve inventory management at your garden center, the time to start is now.
Comcash is a comprehensive POS system that combines sophisticated inventory management, customer relationship management (CRM), and seamless payments. It also has many value-added features to connect directly with customers like e-commerce support and built-in customer loyalty.
Schedule a demo with one of our experts today to see how Comcash can help you master your garden center inventory.