When you get great at inventory breadth, you can grow your revenues more effectively. Volo helps companies grow their sales and average order values. We do this through intelligent supplier sourcing and automating inventory management processes. We’ve previously spoken about how to get great at inventory breadth. In this post, some of our customers touch on the benefits of getting great inventory breadth.
XS – Stock
Multi-category etailer XS-Stock has used Volo’s ecommerce software to manage its inventory breadth since 2007. It has grown 25-30% every year. Mark Gregory, ecommerce Manager for XS-Stock: “From the early days we identified that our success was tied to the range of products we could offer. It was also the range of marketplaces we could be in.”
“We were keen on ease of use and integration into eBay. We also wanted a comprehensive inventory system that could allow locations to be pickable or unpickable depending on the situation. We wanted to have products in various locations and on different height racks. But we still wanted to be able to find them quickly and efficiently. This meant the chosen vendor’s inventory management model was really important to us. The cost of running the software was important to us too.
“Complexity is part and parcel of our business and as a successful ecommerce company we have to constantly manage the complexity. Our creative team, for example, have to deal with all the master listings and create listing SKUs for all our products. We’ve around 10,500 items and 35,000 listing SKUs. Variations come in with the same bar code and we have to allocate a unique bar code for each one and organise the printing and the labels. The system needs to be able to deal with all of that, which it does, no problem.”
KMS Parts
Vehicle parts and accessories merchant KMS Parts uses the Volo’s multi channel software to manage its inventory of over 1.4 million parts. It has seen ecommerce reshape how it does business, creating 13 new jobs. Felix Liu, eCommerce Manager, KMS Parts: “The Volo system is capable of dealing with massive amounts of data. I’m so impressed with how Volo can deal with all this data. Eventually we’ll go to 3 or 4 million master SKUs, each with a different bar code. Volo’s system continues to handle this no problem.
“It’s almost impossible to estimate the benefits of Volo, but let me give you an example. I already told you that we had a guy manually listing items. He managed 600 items, it took him months and it generated £20,000 for us. Now the Volo multi channel system handles 1.4 million items, which is over 2,000 times more than we managed! This growth has created 13 additional jobs, 7 in the office and 6 in the warehouse and dispatch. It’s pushing all the areas of our business and has created employment. Volo has fundamentally changed the business model of KMS.”
The Ink Squid
Office consumables merchant The Ink Squid uses the Volo multi channel platform to manage its inventory and saw its revenues jump 30-40% in 3-4 months. Adrian Meakin, Managing Director, The Ink Squid: “We were doing everything pretty much manually. From listing through to order taking, fulfillment and adjusting stock levels. We wanted to grow the business but we knew we needed to scale efficiently. That meant getting a multi channel program to manage everything… Toners are a multiple of the price of ink cartridges. They have decent profit margins, so you can imagine how important it is for us to be able to list our entire range of more profitable items in such a short space of time.”
Blue Lagoon Products
Home and Garden merchant Blue Lagoon Products uses the Volo platform to manage its inventory and has doubled its staff and doubled its revenues in two successive years. Nick Jones, Managing Director, Blue Lagoon Products: “We wanted to go onto Amazon, but there was no way we were going to be able to manually synch the stock levels with Amazon too. That was when we started looking for outside help…“We started with Volo in March 2012. We doubled our revenue the first year and doubled it the second year. We now have 8 staff, where before we had 3. Soon after the implementation, I worked out how many staff the multi channel software saved us. It was 1 immediately, and is probably 2 now. We’ve about a thousand SKUs and the Volo platform helps us manage the variations. This is more of a problem at Christmas, where we find the numbers of different shapes, sizes and colours tend to multiply.”
