Useful Tips with Stocktaking, Coding And Verifying Products.

It is certainly an exciting day once your first real order arrives to your doorstep. At first encounter, once all the parcels have been neatly packed away into your allocated storage space, you’ll begin to feel a little overwhelmed and maybe a little fearful as to how you are now to turn these packaged items into your very own money making marvels.

Just like any store, the first step is making sure all is fine, so individually check and observe all your products to make sure everything you paid for is present and accounted for.

This stage is the stocktaking process, on a notepad or on your PC using a spreadsheet, make a ‘Product Stocktake’ list and have the following columns ‘Code’, ‘Description’, ‘Colour’, ‘Size’ and ‘Model’.

Now you may not need all these variables, however, simply make columns of what applies to your products and jot down the quantity, description etc. You can leave the ‘Code’ column out for now, however, make sure you fill in the rest.

Now, in order to identify each of your products, you’ll need some type of code or product number. For instance you may have a yellow tennis ball or blue tennis ball so their code might be ‘YELTENBL’ and ‘BLUTENBL’. It may also be just numbers with your business letters for example if your business is called ‘Skin Smooth’, the products can start with ‘SKS-100’. Eventually you’ll simply create your own method of identifying your products, these are only ideas.

If you have a great quantity of different products then you may need to invest in a bar coding gun with PC Software to speed up the process of stocktaking your products, however, the majority of online business we deal with simply create a list and print it on the computer.

An effective and more organized method of identifying your products, using the coding you created, is to purchase label stickers from a stationary store and print and stick codes onto the boxes of your products, this is a cheap alternative and labels can be printed through any standard printer.

If you have a hand held labeling device, you can literally print your code labels on the go, which can really be a convenient especially if you made a mistake. All you’ll need to do then is print the label again instantly.

There really isn’t a wrong or right way for coding and identifying your products, however, it is always essential to make sure that you can easily identify or recall a particular product at a moment’s notice.

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