We’re in the middle of the post-holiday season. That means two factors can quickly overwhelm your inventory: slower sales and higher-than-average product returns.
To deal with excess inventory, many brands look to agile pricing strategies. Done right, these pricing strategies can help you get a handle on inventory without practically giving it away. Let’s explore some proven options for making agile pricing strategies work for you during high-inventory seasons.
Best Practices for Selling to Off-Price Retailers in NuORDER
We asked Jess Chan, Client Services Director, and Josie Qualie, Customer Success Manager, to share their insights on how brands can sell to off-price retailers using NuORDER. According to Chan, the first step is getting set up in NuORDER with the inventory fully loaded into your system.
“[Make] sure you have all the right customer rules and segmentation,” Chan said. That includes setting visibility rules for your inventory “because once you start getting into off-price and closeouts, you’ll have a lot of product in the system that needs to be veiled.”
Veiling inventory is particularly helpful because it lets you choose which customers see which products. “[NuORDER has] those features,” said Chan. “We can help you load the entire book of business, all the inventory that you’re sitting on, be able to visualize it, and understand where it is, what it is, how much of it it is, and then only show that to the appropriate people along with the appropriate price.”
Where does dynamic pricing fit in? Chan recommends building price lists that let you determine the margin you earn in different pricing scenarios. “[With NuORDER,] there’s the ability to load the additional wholesale price or mark the initial wholesale price higher so that you get a better margin when you’re taking a discount,” said Chan.
According to Qualie, NuORDER’s visual representation of these ideas help facilitate your dynamic pricing strategies. “The benefit of using NuORDER for these types of transactions is at least you do have some type of visual representation of what the goods are like,” said Qualie.
"A lot of times, an off-price buyer is just dealing with excel sheets and tiny CADS or things that aren’t necessarily descriptive of what they’re buying. Sometimes there’s not even an image at all. In NuORDER, if the image was loaded at any point, it’s still there to reference. It is helpful for off-price buyers to have a visual representation, especially because they are often consuming such large quantities of goods."
Strategies to Offload Excess Inventory and Drive Pre-Book Sales using Promotions
Our experts recommended these key strategies to offload your excess inventory with our powerful and easy-to-use Promotions tool:
- Date-based pricing. Let customers take on more inventory upfront in exchange for a lower price.
- Volume-based incentives. If a customer takes on more volume, let pricing shift downward. You can also set pricing sets based on different retailers to incentivize buying.
- Shipping incentives. If customers ask for items shipped in a specific window, allow them to take X% off their order.
Simply put, the post-holiday season offers inventory challenges galore. But through agile pricing strategies using an effective B2B Promotions tool, you can incentivize offloading your excess inventory and drive pre-book sales with your customers. NuORDER’s tools, including visibility features that only show products to the appropriate people at the right price, will give you a more direct say in what inventory moves quickly.
Additionally, use NuORDER to offer customers a chance to visualize this pricing. Visualization lets off-price retailers look at their price savings with a simple downloaded image from your eCommerce site. It may not have the excitement of the holiday season, but these are effective ways to manage the post-holiday dip without overloading your inventory.
