A friend of mine decided to start his own business and wanted to use eBay to sell his stuff. He asked me to come by one day and take a look at the items he was selling to see if I would be interested in buying anything before he decided to post them on eBay. I decided to go over to his place one Saturday and check out what he was selling. To my surprise, my friend had items he had bought in bulk from a distributor who was going out of business. These items ranged from health and beauty items such as razor blades, soap, toothpaste to household cleaning items. After spending 45 minutes looking over his inventory, I asked him how he tracks what he buys from the distributors to what he sells. His answer to me was that he doesn't track it, he just keeps up with the money. I immediately though of using Stockpile, our free online inventory system.
So I asked him how he would know if something he was selling was making a profit. He replied by saying that he didn't care as long as he made more money on selling the items then what he paid for all items in total. I told him that for him to maximize his potential profit, He needed to track individual items to and identify a price to sell them at so in the future he would be able to identify what sold well and what didn't. This would allow his to charge a premium for the items that were hot sellers and discount the items that were not selling as well. He said that he did not know of any way to track these items other than a notepad.
That's when I showed him Stockpile. I told him as long as you have a smart phone you will be able to track everything you buy and sell. I also told him it was free. He was ecstatic about the idea and I helped him set up his business in stockpile. I told him to use it for a month and I would check back to see how it was working out for him. A month later I went to visit and to my surprise he was utilizing the stockpile more than I had imagined. He said that he was able to now go to distributors and by only the items he was selling at a high rate. I was able to turn a person who knew nothing about tracking inventory and maximizing profits into a entrepreneur who was now thinking about doing this full time because he saw the potential from accurate inventory management.
