Virtual yard sale and visibility

   One of the themes expressed by supply chain professionals is the need to get better visibility into their inventory. It’s especially important in the ever-growing world of digital commerce, where inventory can be split up to serve multiple sales channels.
   I’ve got a better grasp of the concept after dealing with my own multi-channel inventory issues.
   You see, I’ve downsized. I sold my home and am in a much smaller living space. I don’t need all the big furniture we bought over the years, and some of it is too big. Plus there were kid’s toys, yard equipment, apparel, and other stuff that had to go.
   My first thought was to donate it, because there wasn’t enough time to sell before getting the house on the market and moving. Didn’t want to move stuff I didn’t need.
   But, then, I had success selling some things on Craigslist and I realized that most of my belongings had some value to someone. Maybe I couldn’t sell it on the first try, but with a little patience I could find a buyer.
   Craigslist is only one sales pipeline, and sometimes it can be slow to get hits. I needed more marketing reach.
   I started posting items on the neighborhood homeowners association’s forum page and then discovered online, local sales groups on Facebook. I posted my stuff in multiple groups in our area, including a community for furniture sales.
   My sales took off—relatively speaking—with so many channels in play and I didn’t have to discount right away as I would have if I was only on Craigslist. I also know I’ll never do a yard sale again when I can just conduct my own “virtual” yard sale any time I want.
   When dealing with potential buyers, the challenge quickly became trying to remember what item was on which site at which price. I priced some items differently, depending on the site. And I wasn’t always able to quickly sort out how I had described and priced the items. And when I sold something, I wasn’t quick to remove the item from the other sites.
   I got so good at it, that I outsourced my services to an elderly acquaintance that was selling his home and didn’t know how to use social media or online marketplaces. But I ran into inventory problems too, when he disposed of items without notifying me. If the items had had a bar code and were scanned when they left the house, I could have been automatically notified and had the items deleted, saving me the time of messaging back and forth and manually updating the sites.
   It was a real-world lesson in the importance of having a good supply chain visibility tool.

This column was published in the November 2015 issue of American Shipper.