Managing your inventory — knowing what you have, where it is, and when you need more — becomes increasingly important as your Amazon business grows. The question is whether to use a spreadsheet or invest in dedicated software.
The Spreadsheet Approach
A well-structured spreadsheet (Google Sheets or Excel) can handle inventory management for smaller operations effectively. Track columns for product name, ASIN, quantity in FBA, quantity on order, purchase cost, selling price, estimated profit, and notes. Update it weekly as you purchase and sell stock.
Advantages: free, fully customisable, no learning curve, and you understand the data because you input it yourself. Disadvantages: manual updating is time-consuming, no automatic syncing with Amazon data, easy to make errors, and increasingly unwieldy as your product count grows.
When to Switch to Software
Consider dedicated inventory management software when you have 50+ active ASINs, you are spending more than an hour per week on manual inventory tracking, you have experienced stockouts that cost you sales, or you need reorder forecasting based on sales velocity.
Software Options
InventoryLab combines inventory tracking with listing and profitability analysis. SoStocked focuses on inventory forecasting and reorder planning. RestockPro provides demand-based restock recommendations. Each has a different emphasis — choose based on your biggest inventory management challenge.
What Good Inventory Management Looks Like
Whether you use a spreadsheet or software, the fundamentals are the same. Know your current stock levels at all times. Know your sales velocity for each product (units sold per week). Calculate your reorder point (the stock level at which you need to reorder to avoid running out). And track your days of supply (how many days your current stock will last at current sales rates).
Running out of stock is expensive — you lose sales, your BSR drops, and your organic ranking suffers. Overstocking is also expensive — capital tied up in excess inventory plus storage fees. The goal is to hold just enough stock to avoid stockouts while minimising excess.
The Recommendation
Start with a spreadsheet. It forces you to understand the data and develop inventory management habits. Once the manual process becomes a bottleneck — either through time consumption or through stockouts caused by tracking errors — invest in software that automates what the spreadsheet cannot.