Almost all sectors experience seasonal peaks and troughs – and this applies both to traditional retailers and eCommerce stores. If you're running an online shop, you'll need to have plans in place to manage your inventory so you can capitalise on those peaks.

Some peaks are easy to spot. Festival seasons like Christmas and Eid, for instance, always see a peak in sales as people purchase gifts. It's more than possible to prepare for the increased appetite for cranberry sauce, perfumes, and all the rest, and to make sure you have enough stock to meet demand.

Other peaks can be predicted, but not always with great precision. A footwear store will want a surfeit of flip-flops in its store room for August – but what if there's a heatwave in July, or the hot weather continues into September?

At other times, spikes in sales are unpredictable and can be hard to meet head-on. Let's say a celebrity endorses a particular pair of trainers – there's likely to be increased demand for them, but only fleetingly. This is harder to prepare for than, say, putting in a larger order for Frankenstein masks at Halloween.

Similarly, if a product is recalled, there's likely to be a spike in demand for a safer or more ethical alternative.

What all this means is that businesses of all types and sizes need to prepare for seasonal peaks and troughs, as well as be able to respond to spikes in demand.

Keeping control of your inventory so that you're able to sell like hot cakes without overstocking is a challenge – but it's certainly possible.

How to manage your inventory for seasonal peaks

The simple answer is to look at past sales performance data, make predictions about coming peaks and order a backlog of stock in advance. This gives you the flexibility to adjust prices to meet demand and ensure sufficient stock ahead of time while avoiding supply chain disruption and keeping your marketing campaigns tight and focused.

Planning is key to establishing effective inventory control, so what are you waiting for?

Taking stock

Stock can be categorised according to its seasonality. Doing this allows you to plan your inventory with increased granularity.

You can start by arranging inventory into these three categories:

• Seasonal products
• Perennial products
• Perennial products that are prone to sales spikes

Christmas crackers are purely seasonal – few people are looking to stock up on crackers at any other time of the year.

But let's take a look at Christmas dinner. Some of its key components are perennial – potatoes, for instance. But turkeys are sold all year round, experiencing a sudden upswing around the festive season.

Making these distinctions may seem pedantic, but it means you're better placed to manage your stock appropriately and efficiently. If you own a sports shop, you don't want to run out of joggers in winter or snorkels in summer – but based on your performance data, you need to figure out if it's better only to stock these on-season, or to stock them all year round with carefully managed fluctuations in quantity.

This kind of planning and decision-making also helps you to avoid one of the downsides of seasonality, which is being saddled with leftovers that you struggle to shift, or which – in the case of fresh produce – go off and need to be thrown away, or which become dead stock.

Planning is key

Planning for seasonal peaks and spikes can be tricky. If you're a startup, or just beginning to grow as a business, inventory management can feel like reading tea leaves or gazing into a crystal ball. You may not feel you have the tools to analyse past data and prepare for the future.

That said, there are inventory management tools which you can acquire. Alternatively, there's the option of outsourcing this task to a 3PL (third-party logistics) firm.

By analysing past performance data and identifying seasonal peaks and troughs, you're able to set minimum stock levels with increased confidence – significantly decreasing the likelihood of running out of stock. You can answer key questions like:

1. How much stock do you need, and what lead times do you need to take into account?
2. How much have your customers been willing to pay?
3. How did your seasonal marketing campaigns go? What worked? What didn't?
4. How long did the season last, exactly?

This last point can give you a head start in managing your inventory with precision. Fireworks will sell in much bigger numbers at New Year and Diwali than at other times of the year, but these peak periods are shorter than the winter peaks in scarves and gloves.

Identifying how long the peak will last means you're going into it with your eyes wide open and your stock replenished.

Improving your order fulfilment process

During a seasonal peak or another spike, you'll hopefully receive a spike in sales – and you mustn't be overwhelmed by them. If you're in the early stages of your business, you need to allocate resources shrewdly to meet these demand increases.

This is one reason why you might consider partnering up with a 3PL like Stowsafe. We have the picking, packing, and dispatching capabilities, as well as state-of-the-art inventory control software, to help you always keep on top of demand.

Either way, it's crucial to be prepared for increases in demand by ensuring you have the resources to fulfil all your orders.

How can we help you manage your inventory for seasonal peaks?

Here at Stowsafe, we're dedicated to improving your order fulfilment process, taking these routine tasks out of your hands so that you can focus on what really matters.

A big part of this is inventory management. Partnering with us, your online store will be integrated with our warehouse management system (WMS). This automatically updates your inventory, which you can review and analyse via our online reporting dashboard.

This access to data will help you make good decisions and manage your inventory for seasonal peaks.

If you're interested in partnering with us, why not take a look at our customer fulfilment services?