Inventory Management Challenges for B2C E-commerce Retailers

Abstract

This research was conducted on B2C e-commerce companies or online retailers to study the challenges involved such as demand variations, reverse logistics, seasonal fluctuations, and stockless policy in inventory management and the risks such as lost sales, lost customers, low customer satisfaction associated with the same. This study also includes various strategies to mitigate the risk associated with inventory management of online retailers.The study revealed that online retailers are poised with myriad of inventory management problems such as demand fluctuations, reverse logistics, stock outs, managing SKU's, keeping count of the inventory, multi channel shoppers, bottleneck and weak points, bullwhip effect and distressed stocks. To mitigate these risks online retailers adopted strategies such as dropship strategy, classification of inventory, hybrid strategy, pre-purchase stocks and stock less policy that is purchasing stocks after customer orders. The study also revealed that better inventory management plays an important role in enhancing customer satisfaction levels which in turn helps e-commerce companies in the long run.