Keeping track of your eBay inventory is essential to having an successful business. Whether you have 10 products or 2000 products, it’s important to make sure you store and also organize your eBay intentory in a way that keeps it secure and likewise makes sense. Not being able to locate something you sold is the worst feeling and also ensuring you’re organized is essential to prevent this.
Today I want to show you just how we maintain our stock arranged to make sure that we can swiftly find offered things and also obtain them shipped out to our customers.
If you didn’t know, we work from home full time as well as eBay is our major income source. We also sell on other marketplaces such as Mercari, Facebook and Etsy, but eBay if without a doubt the bulk of our sales so we structure our organization as well as inventory management around what jobs works for ebay. Yet as you’ll see this system will really benefit pretty much any business.
Let’s jump in, shall we?
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What our inventory SKUs mean
Now how do we come up with our SKU’s? We currently have our inventory in two locations so we start off each SKU with the location such as HM for Home or ST for Storage. We follow it with the box number such as BXx the x being that specific box number. We currently have around 90 boxes up at our storage and about 50 at our house.
We are currently working on redoing our number system for each product as we go through to find products that may have fell off of eBay over time without us knowing about it. We are also working to build out a flawless system to keep a better track of the inventory for the future growth of our business. More to come on this system soon.
Where we store our ebay inventory
Since I mentioned the boxes above, I’ll tell you more about our organization system that we have dedicated to our reselling business.
Our system consists of 5 Tier Shelving (such as these) that are fully metal for the longevitiy of their lifespan. To hold our inventory we use banker boxes (such as these) as they don’t sacrifice space. 2 of these Shelving units side by side hold 28 boxes. Each box is labeled with a sticker printed by our Dymo 450 Turbo.
Odd Shaped or Bigger Items
When it comes to odd shaped or bigger items such as mugs, figurines, or electronic items we have seperate shelving units for these items specifically so that there is little to no chance for them to get damaged.
How much does it cost to store and organize 2000+ eBay items?
5-Tier Metal Shelving Unit x 7 at $157.99 each = $1105.93
Bankers Box (20 pack) x 7 at $53.07 each = $371.49
Dymo 450 Turbo $299+
Labels (12 Rolls) $23.99
Total: $1800.41
I know that looks like a lot. It is! But you’re not going to go from 10 items to 2000 items overnight. It took us many years to purchase all of these items, so don’t feel like you need to run out and spend $1800! As you grow your business the more you should invest in your business and inventory system.
Some ideas to save on this system
Buy secondhand: As resellers we know all about this right? See if you can snag shelves or bins from yard sales, thrift stores, craigslist, FB marketplace, etc. You could probably cut that total in half doing this.
Price shop: I like to link to these items so you can easily buy them, but they could be cheaper elsewhere. For example we actually bought our shelves at Costco for $60! If you have a costco nearby and a truck you can save $20 per shelf by buying them at Costco. They have a similar shelf at Sam’s Club as well.
So now you’ve seen how we store our inventory. We’ve been perfecting this system over the course of a couple of many years and think it works pretty well!
If you have any questions or would like to share how you store your inventory I’d love to hear them in the comments below.