IL Webinar Recap Series – Robyn Johnson Edition

Robyn Johnson from Best From The Nest hosted a webinar, along with IL’s Kim McCaffery, that explained the 10 ways she uses InventoryLab to save over 20 hours a month. They shared a lot of great ideas during their time together, and this series will highlight some of those ideas and provide you with additional resources and commentary to expand on their discussion. This post is all about the Custom MSKU Functionality within InventoryLab.

The SKUs Will Set You Free!

Robyn began this section by describing the challenges she and her team faced before they had a uniform system to set up their MSKUs. The team had challenges with the “gobbly goo” SKUs created by another program and Amazon because the MSKU meant nothing to them.

Although it was technically an identifier, a quick glance at the MSKU gave them no information about the product it was attached to. The Custom MSKU functionality allows you to create your own secret code into the MSKU that gives you the pertinent info you need for various business tasks.

How to use the Custom MSKU Functionality

Replenish stock quickly: If you are a seller that does a lot of replens (replenishments), or wholesale, you may know firsthand how challenging it is to isolate all of the items from a particular store or supplier. You can use the supplier field, but there may be a specific line you buy from that supplier and you want to be able to identify it alone.

See patterns faster: Robyn and her team review their Inventory Health and look at all items that have been at Amazon for over 90 days. By using Custom MSKUs, she can quickly identify if one store or supplier is resulting in a lot of potentially stale inventory. This signals to them that they may need to pull back on sourcing that supplier or product line. Conversely, when looking at sales reports, the Custom MSKUs can help sellers quickly identify which suppliers have products doing well and focus their efforts on those areas.

There is no truth test

As Robyn said; “there is no truth test” so information that you want to protect can be coded however you want so that if anyone sees your MSKU, they still cannot identify your buy cost or supplier (the example given on the webinar was assigning a number to represent a supplier so 24 could equal Target in your MSKU).

To hide costs, it is easy to always add numbers before and after it so $1.99 buy cost might read as 0991990320 while $4.50 buy cost would be 0994500320. The feature offers you a lot of flexibility to create the MSKU that works best for you and your business (full instructions for using the Custom MSKU Functionality)

Robyn Johnson started with just $100 and grew that into a seven figure business. She has taken her nerdy passion of selling on Amazon and become an expert on selling on the marketplaces.

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