Retailers take multiple approaches to inventory as supply chain woes wear on: Companies like Utz and DSW are cutting down on SKUs while Walmart and Target are stocking up early.

Quiet Platforms offers a range of services including inventory management, facilitating returns/restocking, and freight. These, it argues, enable its clients to focus on product, marketing, and customer experience rather than logistics, which is difficult to navigate as a midsized merchant. Why it matters: Amid a challenging retail environment, retailers benefit from a diversified revenue stream.

Apparel retailers face a difficult inventory management challenge as they adjust to the rapid shifts in consumer behavior, particularly amid an environment with ongoing supply chain challenges.

Inventory management, along with rising freight and product costs, challenged many merchants, even in categories like apparel (Abercrombie & Fitch) and off-price (Burlington) that performed well.

The etailer is working on a new point-of-sale solution for non-Amazon merchants with features like contactless enablement, customer analytics, and inventory management.

The company aims to serve broader merchant needs beyond its original ecommerce-focused value proposition, through initiatives such as its latest announcement to enable wholesale operations management, Tap to Pay via iPhone, and local inventory syncing with Google.

Manage your inventory to the bottom line. Brands that forecast the right products in the right quantities while pushing on supply chain partners for timely delivery can outmaneuver the competition. When brands fall short on inventory management—which they inevitably will—they can manage through marketing.

Under the hood: The payment suite brings together the Clover point-of-sale (POS) platform and Bypass, a back-office management system that Fiserv acquired in 2020. Clover Sport offers venues contactless payment acceptance, order management, and inventory tracking. The trend: Fiserv has been on a verticalization push—part of an industry-wide trend of developing more tailored offerings.

In response, POS software providers have launched tools like improved multichannel inventory management, more robust loyalty and couponing offerings, and simpler online ordering. They will continue to do so in the year ahead. Three areas will dominate innovation in 2022.

Supplemental nonpayment offerings, such as business management, inventory services, or employee support, are what define ecosystems. SMBs’ digital transformation stretches beyond payments, says Adyen’s Dammeir. Tethering other software offerings to payment tools further ensures SMBs can access all services from one provider.

It also has an app management feature that lets merchants upload and access third-party business apps for things like inventory management, loyalty programs, and returns. Why it’s worth watching: mPOS tech offers distinct advantages for both small and large businesses compared with traditional POS terminals. Small merchants get a cost-effective digital payment and business management tool.

Most payfacs also offer back-office support such as invoicing and billing, inventory management, and purchasing software. For example, in addition to its payment processing solution, Square offers an integrated POS system, an inventory management tool, and an on-demand delivery platform.

Manually managing inventory and merchandising meant that they struggled to maintain control over inventory management and product listings across multiple channels, leading to overselling, lost sales and disappointed customers.

Capabilities include the creation and design of web storefronts, managing product catalogs, support for inventory management, shopping cart and check-out capabilities, and customer account and data analytics. A digital commerce platform can support APIs and connect to third-party apps through a self-service portal.

Retail stores are going to load up on new technologies such as smart shelves, RFID sensors, and cameras for inventory management and supply chain management. Doing so will place networks under more stress than ever, because of the increasing volume of data being generated.

Those renewed cost increases come on the heels of a year in which business logistics expenses rose 22.4%, according to the Council of Supply Chain Management Professionals State of Logistics Report. Transportation costs rose 21.7% and inventory-carrying costs—which measure the value of the goods a retailer has against the cost to store them—soared 25.9% over 2020.

As Amazon’s online business took off, it realized that fulfillment—not only shipping but also returns, warehousing, and inventory management—was an integral part of its retail operations.

Walmart is adding ad formats, including video and in-store opportunities, to its platform, and introducing more automation to make campaign management and optimization simpler, per a company press release. Kroger is opening up its ad inventory to several third-party platforms, making it easier for advertisers to purchase ads and manage their campaigns, per MediaPost.

Square has been rapidly launching new merchant services tools, including enhanced developer offerings and inventory management tools, to tighten seller relationships during the pandemic.

Shop-and-go experiences that leverage computer vision, Lidar, and other technologies for inventory management and customer identification should become more commonplace. We forecast that US mobile payment volume will rise from $705.28 billion in 2019 to $2.541 trillion in 2025 across mcommerce, proximity mobile payments, and mobile peer-to-peer (P2P) payments.