How do you find new inventory for your fabric store?
Most small business owners use multiple online vendor sites to stock their shelves. You may have spent hours researching options and trying to find the best deals. While some shipments meet your expectations, others have likely been disappointing.
New technologies have unlocked a better approach. Point of sale (POS) systems help business owners ring up transactions, manage inventory, and complete other essential tasks. Some providers — especially industry-specific options — offer built-in vendor catalogs with a wide selection of products.
In this blog, we’ll explain how fabric vendor catalogs save you time and improve the way you acquire inventory.
Let’s jump in.
Vendor catalogs are databases of product information. They’re designed to give you options for items to sell in your store.
For fabric products, these catalogs typically include:
Vendor catalogs help you compare products from different providers, making it easier to find the best fabrics at the best prices for your customers. Integrated with a POS system designed for the fabric industry, these catalogs give you quick access to fabric-related items so you can focus on what your audience wants to buy. They also help you keep your inventory in order, manage your website, and make pricing decisions.
Related Read: Retail Vendor Management: 7 Helpful Tips for Quilt Shops
Vendor catalogs often give you access to products from multiple vendors in a single system. Here are the key benefits.
To properly manage inventory at your fabric store, you need a digital record of every product you sell, including fabric, thread, notions, and anything else on your shelves. Using an online vendor catalog to order new stock allows you to automatically import items into your POS system, instead of entering each one manually.
If you’ve ever input inventory into a legacy POS system, you know how time-consuming it can be. Adding names, images, prices, and descriptions for every product is tedious — and it takes time away from other tasks, like helping customers.
With an industry-specific vendor catalog, batches of new products that used to take hours to input now take minutes. Choose the products you want and add them to your POS inventory, your website, or both. In a cloud-based system, imported items update automatically across all devices in your business.
Related Read: Do Your Fabric Store Website Product Descriptions Make or Break the Sale?
Adding items to your inventory directly from your POS system reduces the chance of errors. No matter how careful you are, manually entering hundreds of item names, along with copying images and descriptions, almost always leads to a few mistakes.
These errors can result in duplicate products, incorrect SKUs, inaccurate stock counts, or missing items. If a customer brings a fabric to the register and it doesn’t appear in the system, the checkout process becomes complicated — and you might miss out on the sale.
You can prevent these issues by importing inventory from vendor catalogs, which keeps counts accurate and consistent across your business.
Online vendor catalogs make it easier to offer your customers a wider variety of products. Rather than browsing 10 websites, you can compare fabric styles, materials, and prices all in one place.
For example, if you’re stocking seasonal fabric for an upcoming holiday, you can quickly review your options, find your favorites, compare costs, and decide which items to order. This cuts down on research time and helps you make better inventory decisions.
What used to be a long process — importing seasonal inventory — can now be done quickly, adding items to both your POS system and your website in minutes.
Related Read: How To Keep Customers in Your Store Longer: 10 Strategies for Quilt Shops
Vendor catalogs are a simple way to stay on top of pricing. Small businesses often start with the MSRP and then set their own prices strategically. Catalogs provide this information and update it in your system whenever a supplier makes changes.
It’s also important to understand MAP, or the minimum advertised price — the lowest cost a vendor allows you to advertise publicly. When required by a supplier, this minimum must be followed.
You may have a target profit margin for certain fabric items. Even though individual costs vary, you might aim for a 50% margin on each item. Using special pricing features in your POS system, you can adjust all fabric prices at once based on vendor costs.
You can set your system to notify you of vendor pricing changes, so you can make updates or reprint labels as needed. This means you don’t need to constantly check costs or spend time on extensive manual updates.
Using vendor catalogs from a POS provider helps simplify your inventory management process. Instead of searching for vendors on the web, a catalog native to your system saves time, improves data accuracy, expands your product offerings, and guides pricing decisions.
A POS system designed for the fabric industry is the best choice for features that fit your business.
Like Sew is an all-in-one, cloud-based POS solution built specifically for fabric stores. With vendor catalogs fully integrated, you can place orders for new products right from your system. Comprehensive reporting tools track top sellers, helping you sharpen your purchasing strategy.
Our software also includes tools for payment processing, website design, e-commerce, and marketing, as well as fabric-specific tools like sewing machine repair tracking and fractional yardage calculation.
At Like Sew, we want to get you the features you need at an affordable price. Check out our Build and Price tool to find the best plan for your fabric store!