RickysNYC.com’s inventory was being fed into the online store out of one store location where the distribution center for stocking inventory for all its 32 retail locations was also located. This was very logical, since Ricky’s NYC also fulfilled and shipped products to its online store customers from this single location.

The inventory reflected in the online store was that of the retail floor at the particular store location. There was one problem with this: the particular store at Tribeca represented only 30% of the products the company carried across all locations. The other issue was that particular store at Tribeca was also a lower rate location, or a “C” store (Ricky’s NYC used a grading system in order to distribute stock across its locations). Prime inventory would go to “A” stores or more prominent locations such as Soho or Union Square. The particular store located in a less prominent area of Tribeca would not get any of the high selling products allocated to it because of how slowly they would sell there. You get the picture… I was just a fresh hire and my goal was to grow revenue for the online store, which did not sell much of anything since the online store customers were not getting access to those great products they wanted to purchase online.

After I informed my manager, the President of company, he sent me to the replenishing manager to have him start moving more products to the floor of the Tribeca store so that these products would show up in the online store. The replenishing manager started moving the products, but the problem was that this was a very time consuming and in theory the wrong process to follow.

I continued to do further business analysis.  The product data feed we were receiving for the online store had the inventory for the entire company, as well as the location of the items.  I came up with a better solution. I told the President that we should feed additional inventory from the “A” stores to the website,  so that products that were simply not showing up on the website due to the inventory quantity being zero would start to sell.

I put in the necessary rules and started to feed the inventory from the “A” stores to website . The online store now contained an additional 1856 SKUs that were now available for purchase. Just a simple 3 hour tweak on the product database rule and there you have it. The result was an immediate 21% sales increase.

When I start fresh with a company, I tell my employers that there are dozens of tasks to do. It is important to understand and identify what will bring the most revenue or have the biggest positive impact and to work on those items first.