It all starts small, just a missed update, a wrong stock count, or one item oversold, which seems easy to brush off in the moment. But as orders pile up, these small errors quietly snowball into something bigger like delayed shipments, canceled orders, and unsold stock sitting on shelves.
It’s not just a bad day, it’s a sign that your system is cracking under pressure.
In fact, the average inventory accuracy across businesses is just 65%. If you’re operating below that, the risk of stockouts, lost sales, and excess inventory only grows. And if you’re still relying on spreadsheets and manual checks, those cracks get even wider as your business scales.
And if you’re still relying on spreadsheets and manual checks, those cracks only get bigger as your business grows. What felt like minor errors can turn into daily firefights, costing you time, money, and consumers’ trust.
On the other hand, a smart IMS can completely change the game, giving you real-time visibility, reducing errors, and helping you take full control of your stock.
In this blog, you’ll discover how to improve your inventory accuracy in a warehouse, why it matters more than ever, and how the right tech, like a smart IMS, can turn messy operations into a streamlined, scalable system.
Why Inventory Accuracy Can Make or Break Your Ecommerce Business
In an ecommerce business, inventory accuracy isn’t just a backend metric—it can make or break critical decisions around sales, customer experience, and cash flow.
Retailers put in a lot to get it right—tracking daily sales, reconciling stock, checking warehouse counts, coordinating with suppliers, and juggling sheets across channels. Every step matters to avoid stockouts, overstocking, and missed orders.
But how do retailers know how much product to order in the first place?
You either overstock and tie up capital in dead inventory, or worse, run out of stock right when demand peaks. Both hurt your margins, your ratings, and your customer trust. Without accurate inventory, you’re exposed to costly risks like these
1. Wrong Inventory Valuation: Financial Blind Spots
Suppose your system says you have ₹5 lakhs worth of inventory. But what if ₹2 lakhs of that stock is already sold, damaged, or wrongly recorded? Your dashboard still shows strong profits, so you go ahead and invest in ads, restock more products, maybe even plan a discount campaign. But a few weeks later, you’re wondering why cash is tight, payouts aren’t matching, and margins feel squeezed.
This is the financial blind spot that sneaks in quietly. You’re basing big decisions, spending, reordering, and forecasting on numbers that look right but don’t reflect reality. And the worst part? You may not even realize it’s happening… until it’s already costing you.
2. Ageing Stock Goes Unnoticed
You restocked 1,000 units of a product months ago, but due to inaccurate inventory tracking, the unsold stock went unnoticed. Your system showed healthy numbers, so no alerts were raised. By the time you catch it, the item is outdated or unsellable. Inaccuracy like this locks up capital, reduces margins, and quietly chips away at profits.
3. Inaccurate Inventory Breaks Demand Forecasting
If your inventory data is off, your entire demand forecast is built on shaky ground. You might think you have enough stock and skip reordering, only to stock out during peak demand. Or you overstock based on inflated numbers. In both cases, poor inventory accuracy misguides your planning and leads to lost sales or wasted capital.
4. Inventory Shrinkage
Inventory shrinkage often slips under the radar when your records don’t match what’s actually in stock. Inaccurate inventory tracking makes it harder to detect missing or misplaced items, letting small losses add up over time. Without real-time visibility, you can’t spot where stock is leaking, leading to hidden losses that quietly erode your margins.
Relying on manual processes or spreadsheets might work at a small scale, but as your ecommerce business grows, so do the risks. A single mismatch can lead to stockouts, dead inventory, and inaccurate financial reporting. A smart inventory management system like Unicommerce takes that load off. No more chasing Excel sheets, no more last-minute stockouts, and no more guesswork. It lets you focus on growing your business, not firefighting everyday ops. How? Let’s check this out.
How an IMS Helps Monitor Orders & Inventory Levels and Satisfy Customers
If you’re managing thousands of orders every day using your own quick fixes, kudos! That takes serious hustle. But here’s the catch: even one small mistake in this setup can trigger a chain reaction of mismanagement. A wrong stock count, a missed update, or a delayed dispatch can spiral into cancellations, return requests, missed SLAs, and angry customers. And over time, that fragility doesn’t just create chaos — it chips away at your revenue, reputation, and your ability to scale.
You don’t need more quick fixes – you need smarter systems.
An Inventory Management System (IMS) doesn’t just organize your stock, it prevents the kind of errors that throw your entire workflow off track.
Here are five effective ways of inventory management that can level up your inventory accuracy and give you peace of mind at scale
1. Barcode Scanning: Track Every SKU
One scan, and you know exactly what’s in stock, where it is, and what’s moving—no errors, no surprises.
- Accurate Stock Entry
With barcode scanning, you can track the entire lifecycle of your inventory, starting right from the moment stock enters the warehouse. It captures all product details instantly, making it easy to manage even products with multiple variants. The system records where each item is stored, whether it’s been allocated to an order, and what stage that order is in. For expiry-sensitive items, batching becomes seamless. This automation leaves little to no room for inventory errors.
- Real-time Access
With real-time inventory visibility, you always have a clear picture of your stock. The system instantly updates inventory levels as soon as goods enter the warehouse. You know which lot is assigned to which sales channel, which items have been returned, which products are moving fast, and which ones are sitting idle. This level of inventory control helps prevent errors, overstocking, and missed sales opportunities.
2. Quick Cycle Counting – without shutting down your operations
For eCommerce sellers managing thousands of SKUs, manual inventory checks can eat up entire days and still leave room for errors. That’s where automated cycle counting comes in. Instead of shutting down operations for a full physical count, sellers can run quick, scheduled counts in small batches—daily or weekly—without disrupting order flow. A smart Inventory Management System handles this automatically: it selects which items to count, updates stock levels in real time through barcode scans, and flags any mismatches instantly. This not only saves hours of manual work but also keeps inventory accurate throughout the year—so sellers can focus on scaling, not stock-checking.
3. Inventory Tracking On All Channels
Effective inventory tracking gives you clear visibility into what’s selling fast, what’s moving slowly, and what’s not selling at all on different sales channels. By identifying fast-moving products and spotting dead or idle stock, you can make smarter restocking decisions. This helps avoid both understocking, which leads to missed sales, and overstocking, which ties up capital in unsold inventory.
4. Inventory Reconciliation Across Channels
Inventory reconciliation across channels ensures that your physical stock matches what’s listed on all your sales platforms – Amazon, Flipkart, your D2C website, and more. With a smart IMS, every sale, return, or stock movement is automatically updated across channels in real time. You no longer have to manually adjust stock or worry about overselling. It saves hours of repetitive work, prevents order cancellations, and gives you confidence that your inventory is always accurate, no matter how many channels you sell on.
5. Advanced Analytics
Imagine you sell skincare products across your website, Amazon, and Nykaa. With advanced analytics in your Inventory Management System, you notice that your Vitamin C serum sells fastest on Nykaa every weekend, but sits idle on your website. At the same time, the report shows your retinol cream is overstocked and hasn’t moved in 3 weeks. So, you can get key insights like-
- Avoid overstocking slow-movers like the retinol cream
- Restock fast-sellers like the Vitamin C serum before they run out
- Shift inventory between channels to match demand
- Spot mismatches between recorded vs actual movement, indicating possible shrinkage
Instead of reacting after a stockout or pileup, you stay ahead with data-backed decisions, ensuring your inventory always reflects real demand, not assumptions.
How Unicommerce is Helping Brands Maintain Inventory Accuracy In Daily Ops, Sales Surges, and Festive Chaos
1. Realtime Sync: Instant updates, Reliable tracking, Unified visibility
You don’t have to update inventory every time a sale happens manually or new stock arrives. Unicommerce’s IMS handles real-time sync automatically, ensuring inventory accuracy, reliable tracking, and unified visibility across all channels from a single dashboard.
2. Barcode Scanning
You can assign unique identifiers to each unit and track its location within the warehouse using system-generated barcodes. Unicommerce supports seamless barcode scanning at every step from inbound to picking—so you always know where each item is stored. This reduces manual errors, speeds up operations, and ensures inventory remains accurate and traceable in real time.
3. ERP Integration
Unicommerce’s ERP integration is designed to sync seamlessly with your existing ERP systems, ensuring smooth and error-free data exchange. It captures and pushes real-time information—orders, inventory, returns, and shipments—across marketplaces directly into your ERP. This eliminates manual reconciliation, avoids duplication, and keeps your backend systems fully aligned with your online business operations.
4. Return Management Made Simple
Unicommerce helps you efficiently manage return orders—both Customer-Initiated Returns (CIRs) and Return to Origin (RTOs)—with complete visibility and control. The platform streamlines decision-making on whether to restock or discard returned items and enables timely replacements or refunds. This reduces manual intervention, minimizes losses, and improves customer satisfaction with faster resolution.
5. Simplified Vendor Management
Unicommerce enables businesses to effortlessly onboard, manage, and collaborate with vendors for smooth product procurement. From tracking purchase orders to monitoring inbound shipments, the platform provides complete visibility into vendor performance, delivery timelines, and stock availability, ensuring procurement stays aligned with demand, without delays or bottlenecks.
6. Low Stock Alerts for Timely Replenishment
Stay ahead of stockouts with real-time alerts triggered within your existing workflow. Unicommerce tracks inventory levels and sends timely email notifications when stock falls below defined thresholds—so you can reorder in time and keep your shelves ready for demand.
7. Smart Inventory Slotting Based on Demand and Seasonality
Unicommerce allows you to reorganize your warehouse by slotting inventory based on product demand trends and seasonal spikes. High-velocity or in-season items can be placed in easily accessible zones for faster picking, while low-velocity or off-season stock is moved to the back. This improves picking speed, optimizes storage, and enhances overall warehouse efficiency.
8. 100% Accurate Putaway
Manage bin- and shelf-level inventory with 100% accuracy across both inbound and outbound processes. When it’s time to pick a product, simply refer to the system—it tells you exactly where the item is stored, down to the shelf. Just scan and pick, confidently process the right order without second-guessing, because the system has it all covered.
9. Handheld Device Support for Picking, audits, scanning
With Unicommerce’s smart IMS, you get handheld device support for scanning, picking, and auditing, ensuring 100% accuracy at every step. It streamlines daily warehouse tasks, making life easier for eCommerce teams managing large order volumes.
10. Bundle Management
Especially during peak or festive seasons, bundle orders (like gift sets or combo deals) increase significantly, making inventory tracking more complex. Our smart IMS ensures accuracy by automatically mapping each bundle to its individual SKUs. As soon as a bundle is sold, the system deducts the exact quantity of each item in real time. This prevents stock mismatches, avoids overselling, and ensures that you always have a clear view of what’s available, so you can fulfill high-volume orders without errors or delays.
11. Industry-Specific Solutions
Unicommerce’s smart IMS is built to serve diverse industry needs, including FMCG, cosmetics, fashion, electronics, and personal care. It offers specialized solutions like serial number tracking for complex products such as electronics, ensuring each unit is uniquely identified to reduce duplication and errors. Paired with precise variant management, it gives you full control over what’s in stock, what’s sold, and where every item is, helping maintain high inventory accuracy across categories.
This level of control and visibility has helped brands streamline their backend operations and scale confidently. One such example is Yogabar. Let’s look at how they improved inventory accuracy and operational efficiency with Unicommerce.
Case Study: How Yogabar Streamlined Inventory Accuracy with Unicommerce
Yogabar is a nutrition-led food brand known for offering healthy and wholesome products tailored to modern Indian consumers. As an FMCG brand handling expiry-sensitive inventory, Yogabar needed a robust solution to manage stock efficiently. That’s why they chose Unicommerce—to streamline operations and maintain inventory accuracy across their supply chain. Let’s see what challenges they faced and what solution Unicommerce provided.
The Challenges Yogabar Faced
Lack of a Centralized System: Yogabar aimed to expand across multiple marketplaces but needed flexible, scalable APIs instead of time-consuming direct integrations. They required a solution that could ensure high service standards while accurately capturing order details.
Transit Inventory Discrepancies: A major pain point was damaged goods during transit between warehouses. With no way to log or reconcile losses, discrepancies impacted inventory accuracy and overall business performance.
Expiry Management Needs: As an FMCG brand dealing with perishable goods, Yogabar needed a reliable system to track shelf life from manufacturing to delivery and avoid selling expired products.
Scattered Operations: With multiple warehouses and marketplace listings, Yogabar needed a unified platform to manage inventory, orders, and operations with complete visibility and control from a single dashboard.
Solutions Provided by Unicommerce
Unicommerce offered tailored solutions to streamline Yogabar’s operations and resolve its key challenges:
Robust API Integrations: Enabled seamless onboarding on smaller marketplaces, real-time inventory sync, and accurate order capture, leading to improved sales efficiency and better platform visibility.
Lost-in-Transit Reconciliation: Provided an option to mark damaged inventory as ‘lost in transit’ during warehouse transfers, reducing discrepancies and enabling accurate monthly tracking.
Expiry Management with Tolerance Levels: Set tolerance thresholds for shelf life at the SKU level to prevent near-expiry products from being sold. Added manufacturing details to reports for better visibility.
Custom Documentation: Delivered multiple workflow customizations—image-assisted picking, EAN number mapping in gate passes, and SKU-level cycle counting—to improve accuracy and reduce manual errors.
Accurate Inventory is Not Optional—It’s the Backbone of Scalable E-commerce
Inventory accuracy isn’t just a nice-to-have—it’s what keeps your operations stable, your customers happy, and your margins protected. From inventory shrinkage and stockouts to poor inventory turnover ratios, the risks of inaccuracy compound quickly as your business grows.
A smart inventory management system (IMS) not only helps you track inventory in real time but also simplifies inventory reconciliation, improves inventory control, and supports accurate barcode scanning, cycle counting, and even automated inventory audits.
Whether you’re running a fast-growing D2C brand or managing multi-channel operations, tools like Unicommerce’s IMS offer the visibility and automation you need to reduce errors, respond faster, and make smarter decisions based on real-time stock insights.
FAQs
1. What is inventory accuracy?
Inventory accuracy refers to how closely your recorded inventory matches the actual physical stock in your warehouse. High accuracy means what’s listed in your system is what you actually have on the shelf—no more, no less.
2. What is a good inventory accuracy percentage?
A good inventory accuracy percentage is typically above 97%. Most businesses average around 65–75%, but top-performing operations aim for 98% or higher to reduce errors, stockouts, and overstocking
3. How to measure inventory accuracy?
Inventory accuracy is measured by comparing the physical stock count to what’s recorded in your system. Regular cycle counts or full physical counts help track this accuracy.
4. What is the formula for Inventory accuracy?
The inventory accuracy formula is:
(Accurate Count / Total Count) × 100
For example, if you physically count 980 units correctly out of 1,000 recorded in the system, your inventory accuracy is (980/1000) × 100 = 98%.
5. What are the KPIs for Inventory accuracy?
Key KPIs to track inventory accuracy include:
- Inventory accuracy rate (%)
- Cycle count accuracy
- Inventory shrinkage rate
- Inventory turnover ratio
- Stockout frequency
These metrics help assess how well your inventory is managed and where improvements are needed.
6. How can inventory management be improved?
Inventory management can be improved by:
- Implementing a smart Inventory Management System (IMS)
- Using barcode scanning for accurate tracking
- Performing regular cycle counts
- Automating stock updates across sales channels
- Setting reorder points and safety stock levels
- Training staff on handling and documentation processes
7. What is barcode scanning?
Barcode scanning is the process of using a barcode reader or handheld device to capture and read information encoded in barcodes attached to products or inventory units. In inventory management, it helps accurately track the movement of items during inbound, picking, packing, and dispatch, minimizing manual errors and speeding up warehouse operations.
8. What is the inventory turnover ratio?
Inventory turnover ratio measures how many times a company sells and replaces its inventory over a specific period, usually a year. It indicates how efficiently inventory is being managed. A higher turnover ratio means products are selling quickly, while a lower ratio may suggest overstocking or slow-moving items.