A never-out list is one of the most important pieces of any brand's online strategy.
It's as simple as it sounds: A never-out list is a list of your best-selling products. Typically this is your top 100 SKUs, or however many make up about 80% of your sales across all of your online retail partners.*
That list is your compass for inventory planning and making sure those items never go out of stock. Because these are the products in your online assortment that have the greatest impact, you'll want to allocate inventory budget disproportionately toward them.
Why? Running out of inventory is poison to an ecommerce business for a few reasons:
1. You risk losing sales. Unlike a physical showroom where a customer might not expect to take something home that day, the online shopper expects a more instant gratification. If something can't be delivered to them within a few days, it's likely they'll move on to find something that can.
2. You risk losing your product listing. Most retailers don't take backorders or offer back-in-stock notifications, so once a product falls out of stock, it gets removed from the stie completely to avoid a negative customer experience. It can be re-added once you're back in stock, but even if a customer was willing to wait for an item, you can't sell what they can't find.
3. Stock outages pull you out of the algorithm. Retailer algorithms favor products with strong sales, healthy margins, and consistent stock availability. These factors build credibility over time and help push products higher in search results. But as soon as you fall out of stock, all that credibility is lost, and you have to start nearly from scratch to build it back once you have inventory again.
So, start building a spreadsheet that lists your bestsellers and use this diligently in your inventory planning. A healthy inventory means more opportunity for sales.
*Note: It's likely that your best-selling products online are different than your bestsellers with brick-and-mortar partners. It's a good idea to track sales for these channels separately, so you can plan your never-out list for online accordingly.
Transcript:
A never-out list is simply a list of your best-selling products.
But what really matters is what that list signifies for your online business.
Your never-out list should be made up of your top 100 SKUs, or however many make up about 80% of your brand’s sales across retailers.
These are the products that mean the most to your ecommerce business and that means you want to make sure they’re never out of stock.
You can use this list to allocate your budget towards maintaining inventory on the products that have the greatest impact.
A healthy inventory means more opportunity for sales.
Having a never-out list means you have a clear view into where you can focus additional budget on inventory in order to maintain a zero out-of-stock rate on the products that have the greatest impact on sales.