Dealing with excess stock for subscription brands

Hey subscription brand owner & operator 👋

My name is Youri, founder at Prediko and a tech partner for Skio. We are helping Shopify brands make better predictions & POs to turn stockout & excess inventory into revenue generating experience.

I've spent the last two years developing Prediko. The journey began when my wife Sidney, who operates a jewellery brand called Kimaï, faced frequent stockouts that were hurting the bottom line of her business.

At that time, I was crafting Inventory Planning solutions for major legacy retailers, like Tesco— UK's largest supermarket. However, noticing that many of Sidney’s friends, who also managed Shopify brands, were struggling with the same issues—relying on manual, Excel-based inventory planning, which often resulted in too much or too little stock—I felt the urge to act.

Now, two years later, Prediko is helping hundreds of Shopify merchants in transforming their inventory challenges into revenue generating activities.

This is my first post on transforming excess inventory into a profitable and satisfying customer experience for subscription brands using "Surprise & Delight" strategies.

Surprise & Delight Flows For Subscription-First Brands

Surprise & delight offered by Skio is the most practical tactic for brands to increase their LTV and reduce churn.

Kennan Davison, founder at Skio, shared in his LinkedIn post:

“Our surprise & delight feature lets your customers know via order banner, email, or SMS that they’re receiving a surprise gift with their next order.

But this isn’t a random giveaway…it’s a killer retention tactic ➡️🛒”
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To set up such a flow within Skio, all you need to do is define the number of orders after which you want to send the gift.

So how do you decide what to send as a gift? One obviously doesn’t want to make it “a random giveaway”.

An interesting and simple tactic for brands to reduce excess inventory and improve their inventory flow is to pick a product from the SKUs that are currently in excess and offer it as a gift in upcoming orders.

And how do brands go about finding the right SKU from the excess list? That’s where Prediko Insights helps Shopify brands.

Our insights feature is not available with Inventory Planner and that's why Prediko is one of the top Inventory Planner alternatives

Insights into “Excess Stock”

Prediko plugs into your Shopify store sales data and current inventory levels to predict future sales and compute the number of “excess stock” in your inventory.

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Once you know how many SKUs are in excess stock, you can easily identify which ones can be offered as a free gift in the upcoming subscription order for a particular subscriber segment. The same excess SKUs can also be sent in subscription boxes

You can search across your SKUs and products to find the perfect gift for your subscribers

How to set this up for your brand?

1. Install Prediko’s AI inventory management app from the Shopify App store.
   
2. Prediko picks up your sales, current inventory numbers data from your store to highlight your “Excess stock” situation.
   
3. Once you have visibility of what SKUs you have in excess, as a next step you can decide what to send as a free gift in your surprise & delight order.

The important thing here is to select the right SKU for the right subscriber segment. If you manage to do that you’ll then be able to improve your LTV and hopefully exceed your revenue targets for the year.