If you just started your ecommerce business, you may be using Excel spreadsheets for your inventory management. While this might be fine for a while, Excel is not built to manage inventory at the scale you need if you’re hoping to see exponential growth. Multichannel inventory management requires specialized software that goes beyond a single inventory spreadsheet.
While free Excel inventory templates might be alluring to your budget, poor inventory tracking and management can decrease your inventory value overtime. To avoid bottlenecks as your business grows it’s worth investing in an Excel alternative that will set your inventory management system up with best practices.
What is multichannel inventory management?
Multichannel inventory management is the process of tracking, controlling, and optimizing inventory across multiple sales channels. Ecommerce businesses, especially, are often managing inventory across their own website, marketplaces, and wholesale partners.
Effective multichannel management prioritizes real-time visibility into stock levels, streamlines order fulfillment, and prevents issues like stockouts or overstocking. While inventory may be distributed and stored across multiple locations, multichannel inventory management provides a single, comprehensive view.
By integrating inventory data from all channels and locations into a single system, your business can allocate products efficiently, meet customer demand, and improve supply chain agility. Not only does efficient multichannel inventory management reduce operational costs though, it also improves your customer satisfaction by ensuring products are available when and where they’re needed.
Why Excel Sucks
Microsoft launched Excel in 1985, three decades ago, to provide an accessible and user-friendly interface for performing complex calculations, mathematical functions, and organizing spreadsheets. Since its inception in 1988, Excel has been a part of the Microsoft Office Suite and a key tool for millions of businesses.
There is no disputing that Excel has served as an excellent tool for businesses over the years, but it was never designed for inventory management.
Although Excel inventory management techniques exist, and can serve as a strong starting point for small businesses, the platform is not robust enough for a growing multichannel ecommerce brand. In the long run you’ll find that Excel lacks the efficiency and flexibility to scale your business.
Some of the biggest issues you’ll face with Excel for multichannel inventory management include:
It’s slow and tedious to create
Creating and customizing an Excel inventory management spreadsheet to your exact specifications is a complicated and time-consuming process. Not only will this slow your business down, but the tedious attention required to create Excel spreadsheets properly means that not just anyone is capable of handling it.
While Excel was considered a user-friendly interface at the time of invention, today entire courses exist to teach people how to use the platform. To get the best shortcuts and formulas for your inventory management, you’ll need to either enlist a professional or become an expert yourself.
Pro Tip! If you’ve been keeping your inventory management system in Excel up until now, hold onto your documents. Even if you choose to move to a dedicated inventory management solution, Excel can always serve as a backup to help you keep track.
It’s not scalable
As your business grows, and your inventory management needs become more complex, Excel will rapidly become unwieldy and complicated to manage.
Once your inventory reaches a healthy size, you’re going to be dealing with an increasing number of columns that each take a lot of time to manage, track, and update. Not to mention if you’re expanding onto a second (or third) sales channel.
You start to lose a cohesive picture of your inventory levels as data sprawls out into various columns for each sales channel or warehouse. Navigating your data becomes a slow and laborious process, inevitably involving 100s of columns and thousands of cells. The sheer volume of data without clear meaning is dizzying to even the best accountant.
It offers limited automation
As ecommerce businesses become increasingly reliant on automation for accurate, real-time data, it’s imperative that your inventory management software can live up to expectations. While Excel offers some automation through Microsoft Copilot, it unfortunately still has nowhere near the same level as dedicated inventory management systems.
This means that you’ll have to continue to rely on manual work and data entry to keep your Excel inventory spreadsheet up to date and your stock levels accurate. There are also very limited Excel integrations across key solutions, such as point of sale (POS) tools.
When you’re dealing with large volumes of multichannel orders, you need inventory tracking that’s capable of automatically updating stock levels across all channels and systems.
This leads us to our next point…
It’s a source for human error
Not only does manual data entry slow down your business and bottleneck progress, it can also be a source of errors. Even the best employees aren’t infallible and as errors creep into your inventory spreadsheet they can cripple your business.
If you’re handling large orders or dealing with a stock-out issue minor errors can rapidly become a recipe for disaster. Plus, errors that might be a small irritation in your day-to-day sales can stack up into serious problems during your end-of-year audit.
While free Excel inventory management might be appealing, it can cost you more in the long run then you realize.
It isn’t intelligent or searchable
Even the best Excel inventory management templates lack two core functionalities that you’ll want to track inventory: the ability to search for information quickly and powerful tools to analyze that data.
Excel’s search function is clunky at best when dealing with the vast quantities of data that come with a multichannel business. This makes it incredibly difficult to find key information quickly.
At the same time, Microsoft Excel inventory templates offer limited functionality for analyzing inventory data. There’s no clear way to analyze data to unpack business performance, complete inventory forecasting, or assess customer satisfaction.
What do you need from inventory management software?
While Excel is often the first inventory tracking system for businesses, it isn’t the best option as you begin to experience business growth. Today, a wide variety of inventory management systems exist that offer other tools, far beyond Microsoft Office capabilities.
But what should you look for in alternatives to Excel? Consider the following advanced features when reviewing inventory tracking software.
Real-time inventory tracking
Having real-time visibility across your multichannel business is key for maximizing profits during peak seasons and for proper risk management year-round. The last thing you want is for a delay in manually updating your inventory management template to cause you to miss out on sales or, worse, oversell a product because you don’t know how much stock you have. Efficient inventory management is critical to track sales and ensure strong project management.
Imagine a customer orders the last of a product in your business inventory from your Amazon store. Then, a few minutes later, another ecommerce shopper buys the exact same item from you on Walmart Plus because your inventory data hasn’t been updated.
By offering real-time inventory tracking you can avoid this predicament, automatically syncing inventory data across all platforms and hiding out-of-stock items on your site. While Microsoft Excel might help you create charts or graphs to visualize sales, it fails to provide these more advanced features necessary for multichannel inventory software.
Automatically updating
Not only should your inventory software automatically refresh periodically to provide you with updated and accurate inventory data, it should also allow you to create automated inventory “rules” to complete repetitive tasks in your inventory spreadsheet.
Automated inventory rules help to adjust and monitor stock levels across sales channels to ensure that your product listings remain fully optimized. For example, you can use automated rules to create urgency on a listing by adding a banner that says “Only 3 left in stock!” Or, you can use rules to increase price as you begin to run low on stock, maximizing profits.
Pro Tip! Choose an inventory management system that also has (or integrates with) a repricer tool, such as this one offered by Base.
The most advanced inventory software will even offer automations that can reorder products that have gone out of stock due to increased demand.
Accessibility across multiple warehouses, devices, and users
No matter how much time, energy, and money you invest in an effective inventory management system, it’s all lost if you can’t access inventory data across multiple devices easily. The best inventory management systems will guarantee easy access to live data for multiple users, typically through the cloud.
Remember, that as you scale your business you’ll likely need your inventory management software program to scale with you. This means that it’ll need to support multiple users, multiple warehouses, a growing inventory list, and even more raw data. With that in mind, it’s okay to choose a basic Excel alternative or free template as long as you can upgrade when the time is right.
Sales Forecasting
Accurate inventory data and financial data from your inventory management software should be regularly compiled to identify stock-out patterns and low performing items. Viewing these advanced insights periodically can help you to identify turnover and optimize your inventory processes through clear sales forecasting.
The best software will go one step further still and perform thorough data analysis to generate inventory forecasting reports for your business. Over time, this inventory data will help you identify seasonal patterns and capitalize on busier seasons to see exponential growth while maintaining a high level of confidence that your supply chain can meet demand.
Integration with Sales Channels
While it might seem obvious, it’s critical that you pick an inventory management system that seamlessly integrates with all your current sales channels and any channels you’re looking to expand onto. Your inventory management strategy should help save time and save money. Clunky integrations will hurt your multichannel business in the long run.
Consider using a platform that already integrates with hundreds of ecommerce marketplaces to make tracking sales easy.
Warehouse management capabilities
Features like barcode scanning for inventory id’s and batch order tracking can drastically improve your efficiency. Modern inventory software systems integrate with mobile devices for real-time updates to reduce errors in large warehouses with frequent deliveries.
Alternatives to Excel
Ultimately, Excel is a great tool if you’re looking to store inventory data and create charts for your small business. However, as you scale up to a multichannel ecommerce, Excel files are just not built to handle complex projects of that size. At the same time, Microsoft Excel no longer provides the type of intuitive interface that business owners need to keep things running smoothly and unfortunately comes with a steep learning curve.
If you’re looking for Excel alternatives for your inventory spreadsheet, consider the following options to help you make informed decisions:
Google Sheets
Although Google Sheets might seem like the perfect Excel alternatives, especially since it offers a free version and Microsoft Office Suite is very similar to Google Workspace. While the free version of Google Sheets offers far more collaboration features and easy to use templates, it still comes with many of the same problems as Microsoft Excel.
Google Sheets is not built to handle the sheer volume of inventory data that comes from a multichannel ecommerce business. You’ll find that the easy to use templates can’t keep up with the best inventory management processes, and there’s still limited automation options.
Inventory Management Software
Inventory management templates are a dime a dozen these days. If you’re looking for inventory management Excel alternatives online, you’ll find plenty of generic spreadsheet programs. However, most of these templates won’t help you keep track of all the tiny, but critical, aspects of your business.
While essential columns remain important in today’s supply chain, it’s also imperative that your inventory management software integrates with sales channels, repricing tools, shipping services, and can handle complex automations.
Base
If you’re an ecommerce retailer selling across multiple sales channels, multichannel inventory management should be a top priority. Having the right products in stock can easily be the difference between exceeding sales targets and missing them completely– especially if you’re managing multiple warehouses. Luckily, Base offers a full suite of tools for multichannel inventory management.
Base offers sellers a fully integrated solution for multichannel ecommerce management, including order, shipping, product, and marketplace management, among a variety of other tools. You can get started today with Base’s 14 day free trial here.
