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What would your reaction be if we told you that you can save time on inventory management with effective inventory visibility? Kimai, a luxury and sustainable jewellery brand, was able to do so.
Not only did they save 10 hours per week, but they also reduced delivery time by 43%. This is just one of the few benefits inventory visibility brings.
We break down how to improve inventory visibility and steps to set it up for your Shopify store, without turning it into a full-time job.
Common Inventory Visibility Challenges
Improving inventory visibility isn't just about counting stock. It’s about knowing where your products are, how much you have, and when you’ll need more.
But getting that clarity is harder than most realize. Different tools don’t sync. Teams work in isolation. And when the data isn't reliable, you spend more time reacting to issues than preventing them.
Let’s look at what gets in the way and what happens when you don’t have full visibility.
1. Siloed operations
Every team is doing its own thing, often using different systems. Sales push orders. The warehouse packs and ships. Procurement tries to forecast demand.
But no one sees the full picture. Information lives in separate tools, and updates are rarely shared in real time. So decisions are made in isolation, which creates friction and errors.
2. Manual systems
If you’re still managing inventory with spreadsheets or relying on someone to update counts by hand, mistakes are bound to happen.
One skipped update or formula error can throw off your entire view. And by the time the issue is caught, it’s already affected orders, stock levels, or vendor communication.
3. Delayed data updates
When you manage inventory on tools that do not update in real-time, the data you're seeing is often outdated, and you’re not really seeing anything at all.
A product may appear in stock, but by the time it’s supposed to be picked and packed, it’s gone.
These gaps aren’t just frustrating, they directly affect fulfillment speed and accuracy. And without timely information, even demand planning becomes difficult.
4. Disconnected platforms
You’ve got a WMS, a POS, maybe a 3PL, and your Shopify backend, but they don’t fully connect.
So your inventory levels may look fine in one place, but totally off in another. And reconciling that manually slows everything down.
Consequences of Poor Inventory Visibility
These problems don’t just stay behind the scenes. They spill into daily operations, customer experience, and financial performance.
Poor visibility doesn’t just make your job harder, it makes your outcomes worse in the following ways
1. Stockouts
Customers place orders for items that aren’t really in stock. Without accurate inventory visibility, you have to cancel or delay shipments.
This deteriorates customer trust and puts pressure on support teams to clean up the mess. Over time, it drives shoppers elsewhere.
Want to know other reasons behind stockouts? Here’s a guide for you.
2. Overstocking and excess inventory
With the wrong numbers in place or limited visibility across different locations, many businesses end up ordering too much.
Inventory piles up in warehouses. Seasonal products miss their window. And working capital gets tied up in items that won’t move for months.
3. Customer dissatisfaction
Inventory visibility issues show up in ways customers notice. Delays. Wrong items. Inconsistent updates.
When people don’t get what they ordered or don’t know when they’ll get it, they lose confidence. And with so many alternatives out there, they don’t always give second chances.
4. Decision-making delays
When you can’t trust the numbers, you hesitate. Should you restock now? Hold off? Clear out old SKUs?
Without a clear view of inventory, decision-making slows or relies on instincts. That creates risk at every level, from forecasting to reordering.
Benefits of Improved Inventory Visibility
The moment visibility improves, operations stop reacting and start responding.
But that’s just the surface. What happens underneath is where the actual value lies, on the balance sheet, across teams, and at every decision point.
Let’s break that down.
1. Lower Operational Costs
Inventory costs are rarely just about purchase price. You’re also paying to store, track, move, insure, and eventually, if needed, liquidate stock. The longer something sits unsold, the more it costs.
Poor visibility leads to overordering. Overordering leads to bloated warehouses. And bloated warehouses lead to higher holding costs, more markdowns, and tighter cash flow.
The cost issue doesn’t stop at overstock. It also shows up in rushed restocks, emergency freight, and team hours spent on fixing preventable mistakes.
How inventory visibility reduces cost
- You stop buying “just in case” and start buying “just in time.”
- You catch slow-moving SKUs early enough to act
- You reduce dead stock that sits untouched for months
Start with a real-time view of SKU-level data. Not weekly summaries. Not spreadsheets. Actual live numbers across sales, warehouse, and in-transit stock. That’s the baseline.
Here’s a more detailed guide on how to take control of your inventory costs.
2. More Accurate Forecasting
Most teams forecast demand using historical sales data, spreadsheets, and a lot of gut feel. This type of forecasting fails because of incomplete inventory visibility.
It works until demand starts shifting in a way you didn’t anticipate. And when it does, the lag between what’s really happening and what your forecast thinks is happening creates overstock, stockouts, and missed sales.
How inventory visibility changes this
- You get signals from the actual sell-through rate, not just past sales
- You see current stock levels, lead times, and other important metrics in real-time
- You can proactively adjust when trends shift or promotions kick in
Let’s say you’re running a campaign, accurate inventory visibility means you can see the demand across locations in real-time and adjust, not a week later when shelves are already empty.
If you're exploring tools, check out our roundup of the top demand planning software for Shopify brands.
3. Greater Flexibility When Demand Shifts
Promotions don’t always scale neatly. One product picks up faster than expected. Another may stall. A shipment arrives late. Something breaks in the system.
The only thing that matters is how quickly you can respond before customers feel it, for which you need to
- Spot which SKUs have a growing demand and reorder before it reflects in customer complaints
- Shift inventory across locations based on demand
- Respond to fulfillment delays as they happen and keep customers informed
Target didn’t just add more warehouses when ecommerce demand surged. They turned stores into mini-distribution centers, because that’s where the inventory already was.
With visibility across locations, they could fulfill online orders faster without expanding infrastructure. That move helped them cut down excess inventory by roughly $2 billion over two years and respond to demand shifts without overbuying.
Which Technologies Enable Real-Time Inventory Visibility?
Traditional inventory systems often fall short because they store data locally, making it hard to sync updates across warehouses, retail stores, and ecommerce platforms.
Cloud-based platforms (like Prediko), however, are designed for real-time visibility across your entire supply chain.
The moment stock moves, everyone from procurement to sales sees the update instantly. This eliminates decision delays, reduces miscounts, and keeps inventory records centralized and accurate.
Such tools also integrate with POS systems, supplier portals, and fulfillment apps, so updates flow seamlessly across your entire operation.
With this level of inventory visibility, your business can move with the speed and accuracy of major retailers like Target, avoiding over-ordering, stockouts, and costly surprises.
How to Improve Inventory Visibility Step-by-Step
If visibility is broken, the fix doesn’t start with investing in another tool. It starts with a process. What systems are running, what data is flowing (or not), and who’s making decisions using it.
This section walks through the steps that matter, what to check, where to look, and how to build a setup to improve inventory visibility.
Step 1: Assess current systems
Most people skip this step. They assume their setup is “fine.” Then a stockout hits, or a promotion oversells, and no one can explain why the numbers don’t match.
That’s what this step is for. You’re not fixing anything yet. You’re just getting honest.
Start by listing every place inventory gets tracked. Shopify. Your 3PL portal. Spreadsheets. Warehouse software. Some tools might update every minute. Others haven’t been touched in weeks. That matters.
Then ask your team how they use it. Which system do they trust? Where do they get stuck? What do they double-check manually?
This is the part where the real problems show up. You realize inventory is “live” in one system, but delayed in another. Sales looks at one number. Ops looks at a different one. And somehow, finance is still using a CSV.
You don’t need perfect answers right now. You just need a full picture. Because whatever tool you bring in next has to clean this up, not add to it.
Step 2: Build a strategy
The next step is to build a strategy that actually makes sense for your business, not just a set of tasks, but a clear idea of what you’re aiming for and how you’ll measure it.
This isn’t a vision statement. It’s alignment. Visibility means different things to different teams. Sales wants to know what they can promise. Ops needs to know what’s running low. Finance cares about stock value sitting on shelves. If you don’t define what success looks like, each team runs in its own direction.
The strategy starts with setting goals; trackable metrics tied to real operations.
- Inventory accuracy: How close is your system count to what’s actually in the warehouse?
- Stock turnover: How often do you sell through and restock core SKUs?
- Fulfillment speed: How fast are you shipping once an order drops?
Once you’ve locked these in, they become the filters for everything else, what tools to adopt, what workflows to clean up, and what not to fix because it isn’t broken.
A strategy makes sure you’re moving in the right direction.
Step 3: Choose the right technology
Most teams hit this point and jump straight to demos. That’s a mistake.
Choosing tech isn’t about features. It’s about fit. The right tool matches your workflows, not the other way around.
If your team is running across Shopify, Amazon, and a warehouse, you need a system that can track inventory across all three and return one clean answer, no stitching together exports.
Tech should solve problems you already know you have. If the platform gives you ten dashboards but none of them help you decide what to reorder, you’re just adding noise.
What to look for
- Can it handle multiple locations and channels?
- Does it account for supplier lead times, safety stock, and PO frequency?
- Will it integrate cleanly with what you already use, or does it force a full rebuild?
Good software will make your existing workflows easier to repeat and add a layer of intelligence to every step.
Step 4: Ensure easy integration
This is the part most people underestimate. Even the best inventory software breaks if it’s working in isolation.
Integration isn’t a one-time connection. It’s the constant sync between your sales data, inventory records, purchase orders, and fulfillment flow. If any of that is delayed or disconnected, your visibility will always be off.
And when visibility is off, decision-making gets slower, risk increases, and teams go back to checking spreadsheets manually. Which is exactly what you were trying to stop.
You need full sync between
- Inventory counts (real-time, not daily)
- Order inflow (from every channel)
- Fulfillment updates (including exceptions and returns)
This is important for knowing how much you have, what’s coming in, what’s going out, and what’s falling behind.
Step 5: Monitor & optimize
Getting visibility isn’t the win. Keeping it is.
This part is what makes the system resilient. Because demand shifts. SKUs change. Lead times stretch. If you’re not reviewing what the data is telling you, you’ll start slipping, slowly at first, then all at once.
Set up a review loop. Not just to check numbers, but to make decisions. Are your reorder points still right? Is one supplier dragging the average down? Are you carrying dead inventory in one region while stocking out in another?
This isn’t a quarterly project. It’s a habit. And the teams that build it into their ops flow are the ones that stop firefighting and start running clean.
Prediko’s Role to Improve Inventory Visibility
Most modern brands don’t have inventory visibility because the tools they’re using were never built to handle the way inventory actually moves now, across multiple channels, suppliers, and fulfillment partners. Prediko was built for this exact reality.
It solves the inventory visibility problem at three key levels: real-time data, predictive insights, and scalable integrations.
1. Real-time inventory visibility across locations
Prediko offers an intuitive dashboard that displays what’s available, where, and what’s moving, in real-time for each SKU or product.
It seamlessly syncs inventory levels across all locations, such as warehouses, retail stores, and fulfillment centers, so that stock is updated instantly to prevent delayed decsions and discrepancies like overstocking or stockouts.
2. Purchase order management
Knowing what’s on the way is just as important as knowing what’s already in stock. Purchase order visibility is often where things break, orders get delayed, details get lost in spreadsheets, and no one knows until it's too late.
Prediko offers a unified dashboard to create, track, and manage all POs across multiple locations and suppliers. Users can monitor PO statuses ("created," "approved," or "received"), check supplier lead times, and update delivery dates, without juggling spreadsheets or emails.
It also simplifies supplier interactions by allowing users to export POs as Excel or PDF files or send them directly via in-app emails.
This leads to
- Accurate stock projection windows based on incoming orders
- Fewer over-ordering mistakes
- Less time chasing updates or managing spreadsheets
3. AI demand & supply planning
Once inventory visibility is in place, the next challenge is figuring out what to do with all the data.
Prediko’s AI algorithm helps execute the next steps. It brings together past sales, seasonality, marketing campaigns, growth trends, and revenue targets to generate accurate demand forecasts.
It then looks at your sell-through rate, stock cover levels, and lead times, layering in forecasted demand, down to the SKU level to recommend exactly what to reorder, when, and how much.
Prediko doesn’t wait for you to realize a SKU is running low. It surfaces that insight before it hits zero. Not just with alerts, but with full reorder logic.
- How many days of stock you currently have
- When your next delivery window opens
- How long will it take to fulfill the projected demand in that time
4. Easy integration with 60+ platforms
Adding a new tool shouldn’t mean rebuilding your stack. Prediko integrates with over 60 platforms, including 3PLs and WMS, so that inventory data isn’t siloed in different dashboards.
With Prediko, your Shopify sales get tracked instantly, purchase orders update in real-time across your WMS, and buying plan reflects current stock availability.
Once the systems are connected, inventory visibility becomes something your team doesn’t have to think about. It’s just there.
Smarter Inventory Management Starts with Full Visibility
Inventory visibility isn’t just about knowing what’s available across sales channels; it’s about having a clear, real-time view of your entire supply chain, even if you’re operating on just one sales channel.
From supplier delays to in-transit stock, and from raw materials to finished goods, full visibility helps you plan better, react faster, and grow smarter.
Prediko gives you that visibility. From forecasting demand to tracking POs, flagging overstock, and syncing data across locations, it turns scattered inventory insights into one intelligent system.
See how it works by starting your 14-day free trial today.
FAQs
What is the 80/20 rule for inventory?
The 80/20 rule means 80% of your revenue usually comes from 20% of your SKUs—so those high-impact items should get the most attention in inventory planning and management.
What are the factors influencing inventory levels?
Inventory levels are shaped by sales velocity, lead times, supplier reliability, seasonality, and how often you review or adjust your stock performance.
How does AI improve inventory visibility and forecasting?
AI processes large amounts of live sales data, stock movement, and supplier lead times to generate accurate demand forecasts and reorder suggestions.
How does real-time inventory visibility improve supply chain efficiency?
It keeps everyone on the same page with up-to-date stock data, helping you avoid stockouts, cut excess, and make faster, smarter decisions.
