Is your merchandise sitting in the store's back room? Here is a simple method to tell.

 

By Sheldon Cwinn

 

How to make sure your inventory is getting to the shelf.

 

Selling to Wal-Mart is unlike selling to any other retailer because it is really selling on consignment. You receive an advance on your merchandise sitting in the stores, but that is all it is an "advance". If you analyze the situation closely, you come to realise that your actual customer is each individual store, and the most successful Wal-Mart vendors have relationships with their top stores.

 

Because your merchandise is at Wal-Mart on consignment, a key factor in succeeding is making sure that your merchandise is actually on store shelves.

 

The traditional way of "seeing" whether or not your inventory is on the shelf is to look at the "store on hand" on a Store Detail Sales Report produced by Retail Link. Another way to double check is to see what merchandise has shipped out of the Distribution Center(s) and to which stores it is shipped. But the question is .... is your merchandise really making it to the store shelf ?

 

A great way to find out if the merchandise is actually on the floor is to check for phantom inventory. To do this you average each store's sales for the last 6 - 8 weeks. Then you look for stores that have below a certain sales threshold last week (often times zero) depending on the nature of your product. Next look at the "on hand qty". If there is quantity on hand and suddenly the store is not producing sales chances are that store has phantom inventory.

 

Resolving the phatom inventory issue is easy. Simply present that store manager with the facts in a friendly phone call. It is in his interest to place the merchandise on the shelf where it belongs!