Why Variant Inventory Matters

Inventory management is one of the most important and stressful parts of managing any sort of company that deals with buying/selling/trading products. It is something that, when done well can make you and your staffs’ lives much easier and when done poorly can result in loss of time, wasted energy, and potential loss of profits.

There are many ways to catalogue your inventory of products. There’s batch inventory for items that are made from the same raw materials in the same place at around the same time. There is also serialized inventory which is useful for products that can be identified as individual pieces through serial numbers or index numbers.

And then there’s today’s topic, variant inventory. Let’s dig a little deeper.

The Basics

A variant item is the name given to a type of product where there is a single overall design but it has variations based on different attributes. These can include color, size, flavor, weight, and more.

For example, the iPhone 12 is a specific single product which comes in 64GB, 128GB, and 256GB variants. For the purposes of inventory management, adding each variant of the iPhone 12 as a unique product is inefficient and time consuming. So, it is best to group them all under iPhone 12 and simply have there be variations of it.

The Benefits

Let’s talk about the benefits of using a variant inventory system to deal with your variant products.

First and foremost, it saves time. Going through the inventory and adding each individual variant of a product instead of grouping them together is a huge waste of your staff’s time. They could have made much more meaningful progress with doing inventory in the time it takes to input what is basically the same product, multiple times.

Secondly, having a variant inventory system gives your staff the ability to cater to different kinds of customers who might want the same product, but have different needs. A good example of this might be t-shirt sizes. By having the basic overall design be the product and having variants that your staff can search through (in this case, size), the purchasing process can be made smoother for the customer and more convenient for the staff.

A variant inventory system can also save you and your staff a lot of time. Under normal inventory systems, if you have a product with (for example) 3 storage sizes and 4 color variants, you would need 12 entries to properly represent these products. However, with a variant inventory system, you only need one entry. The variants are available within the entry itself.

For the data and analytics lovers out there, the variant inventory system offers the ability to view all sales of a particular product easily, regardless of how many variants there are. This can help you discern which variants are more popular and which ones your customers don't prefer. And that's just the tip of the iceberg!

An additional benefit for having variant products is that it can increase sales. Offering different variants of a product is more likely to appeal to different customers with different needs. Whether it is food, tech, clothing, etc. consumers have a diverse array of preferences. They tend to respond positively when these preferences are catered to.

The Recommendation

The ubiquity of and ease-of-access to technology has brought most stores firmly into the digital age. Gone are the days of logbooks full of inventory that need to be updated through pens. Most stores in the modern age now favor POS systems to help them manage their business.

As such, the question becomes which POS system is best for your place of business. It must be easy to use, customizable, easy to install, flexible in its use, generate analytics when you need it, and be able to support different types of inventory management, including variant inventory.

Allow us to introduce you to Ewity.

Ewity is a POS system that is all that we’ve mentioned before and more. Offering a Starter Plan for FREE and a Professional Plan for $39 per location, per month (paid annually), Ewity is a juggernaut of a POS system which is easily accessible through your web browser. No additional apps or hardware installation necessary.

Ewity offers you and your staff a great deal of control over your inventory system, among other things. Support for variant products is available by default and is very intuitive. It can even set different prices for the different variants if needed.

Hop on over to our website and sign up to try Ewity for free and see what we can do to improve your inventory management system.