There is a problem that almost no ecommerce brand talks about openly — but that most face at some point.
It's not lack of sales. It's not a bad product. It's not the price.
It's inventory.
They bought too much in one season and capital got frozen in boxes nobody ordered. Or they bought too little right before a peak and lost sales that were already there, ready to close. Or they sold across two channels simultaneously without synchronization, and ended up promising products that no longer existed.
We have spent years working alongside ecommerce brands in Mexico and Latin America, and these patterns repeat themselves over and over again, regardless of the size of the operation.
That's why we decided to share what we've seen work — and what clearly doesn't — so that more brands can make better decisions about their inventory.
Inventory Is Not a Warehouse Problem: It's an Information Problem
Most inventory mistakes don't happen in the warehouse. They happen weeks earlier, when someone makes a purchasing decision based on intuition, on a supplier's latest promotion, or on a spreadsheet nobody has updated in three days.
The warehouse only makes visible what already went wrong.
When a brand starts gaining real visibility over its inventory — with updated data, clear metrics, and alerts that arrive before the problem escalates — decisions change. Not because the people are better, but because the information is better.
And that difference, which seems small on paper, translates directly into margin, cash flow, and the capacity to grow.
The 6 Inventory Metrics That Actually Matter (And That Few Monitor)
You don't need a sophisticated system to get started. You need clarity about what to measure.
These are the metrics that, in our experience, have the greatest impact on the profitability of an ecommerce operation:
1. Inventory Turnover
How many times you sell and restock each product in a given period. A slow-moving product isn't necessarily bad, but it is a clear signal that you're tying up capital that could be working elsewhere.
2. Days of Coverage
How many days your current inventory will last at today's sales pace. This single metric can save you from a stockout if you review it regularly. Knowing you have 8 days of inventory left on your best-selling product completely changes your day's priorities.
3. Storage Cost per SKU
How much it costs you to keep each product in inventory. Some SKUs generate more storage cost than they generate in margin. Those products deserve a serious conversation — and often the answer is to discontinue or liquidate them before the problem grows.
4. ABC Analysis
Not all products deserve the same attention or the same level of investment. The top 20% of your SKUs probably generates 80% of your revenue. Knowing which those are completely changes how you prioritize your operations, purchases, and storage space.
5. Stockout Rate
How frequently you run out of stock on key products. If this number is high, the problem isn't demand — it's replenishment. And that's something that can be corrected with clearer processes and earlier visibility.
6. Inventory Accuracy
How well your system aligns with what you physically have in the warehouse. A 5% discrepancy between your system and your actual inventory may seem minor, but at high volume it becomes cancellations, overselling, and loss of customer trust.
The 6 Most Common Inventory Management Mistakes in Ecommerce
After working with hundreds of brands, certain patterns appear again and again. These are not mistakes made by careless people. They are mistakes made by systems that don't deliver the right information at the right time.
1. Managing Each Sales Channel Separately
Selling on Shopify, Mercado Libre, and Amazon simultaneously without centralized synchronization is a recipe for overselling. And an oversale on a marketplace has consequences that go beyond the cancellation: it affects your reputation, your positioning within the platform, and in extreme cases, can cost you the account.
2. Reacting Instead of Anticipating
Most emergency purchases, express freight, and last-minute cancellations can be avoided with one thing: early visibility. Knowing five days in advance that a product is about to run out completely changes the options available. With one day's notice, the options are far more expensive and limited.
3. Not Differentiating Between A, B, and C Products
Treating all SKUs equally creates inefficiencies at both ends: overstock on slow-moving products and stockouts on bestsellers. Not all products need the same safety buffer, the same review frequency, or the same level of operational attention.
4. Ignoring Seasonality
Every category has its own patterns. What you sold last November isn't a perfect guide, but it is an important signal. Brands that analyze their history honestly arrive better prepared for each season, with the right inventory at the right time.
5. Relying Too Much on Spreadsheets
Not because spreadsheets are bad tools. But because at a certain operational volume, they become fragile. A data entry error, an outdated tab, or a file someone forgot to share can generate decisions that cost thousands.
6. Buying Based on Supplier Promotions, Not Real Demand
"They offered us a special price if we bought double." This phrase precedes many of the overstock cases we've seen. A purchase discount that generates three months of unnecessary storage is almost never a good decision, even if the initial math looks attractive.
The Real Cost of Poor Inventory Management
This is what few brands calculate clearly.
Beyond the lost sale: the cost of a stockout isn't only the lost sale. It's the customer who went to a competitor and didn't come back. It's the negative review. It's the marketing campaign that launched right when there was no inventory to support it.
Beyond the occupied space: the cost of overstock isn't only the space it takes up. It's the capital that's unavailable to purchase the products that do sell. It's the storage cost that accumulates month after month. It's the liquidation at cost price that destroys margin.
Beyond the cancellation: the cost of channel desynchronization isn't only the cancellation. It's the penalty in the marketplace algorithm. It's the time a team member spends manually resolving something that should be automatic.
When you add all of this up, poor inventory management is typically the primary margin destroyer in ecommerce operations — ahead of logistics, returns, or even customer acquisition cost. For brands working with registered merchants and third-party logistics providers, these costs compound even faster without the right systems in place.
What Separates Ecommerce Brands That Scale From Those That Stagnate
It's not the size of the budget. It's not the number of SKUs. It's not how many channels they have active.
It's the ability to make fast decisions based on reliable information.
Brands that grow sustainably tend to have one thing in common: they know at all times how much inventory they have, where it is, how long it will last, and what they need to reorder. Not because they have large teams, but because they have systems that give them that visibility without friction.
And when that visibility is integrated with the rest of the operation — with the warehouse, with the sales channels, with direct sales fulfillment in Mexico — decisions stop being reactive and become strategic.
That's the difference between operating while putting out fires and operating with clarity.
How to Improve Your Inventory Management Today: Concrete Steps
You don't need to change everything overnight. There are concrete steps any operation can take this week.
1. Define Your A, B, and C Products
Take your full catalog and classify it by sales volume and margin. From there, everything else gets prioritized with much greater clarity.
2. Calculate Your Days of Coverage per SKU
Divide your current inventory by your average daily sales. If any key product has fewer than 15 days of coverage, that deserves immediate attention.
3. Identify Your Hidden Costs
Review how much you're paying in storage for slow-moving products. That number tends to be surprising, and it's usually the first place where there's an opportunity to free up capital.
4. Synchronize Your Channels
If you sell on more than one platform, make sure inventory updates in real time across all of them. This is one of the changes with the greatest immediate impact. Working with specialized logistics companies in México City can also accelerate synchronization significantly when multi-warehouse operations are involved.
5. Build a Weekly Review Ritual
Having the data available isn't enough. Teams that review their inventory metrics weekly make better decisions than those that do it monthly, regardless of which system they use. This is especially relevant for fast-growing verticals like fulfillment in Mexico for fintech companies, where inventory velocity and compliance requirements demand constant visibility.
Free Demand Planning Tool for Shopify
We've built a free Demand Planning tool so that any Shopify store can have real inventory visibility starting today.
What does it do exactly? You connect with your Shopify in 1 click and the tool pulls your real data to show you SKUs at risk of stockout before it's too late, inventory surpluses where you're unnecessarily tying up capital, and suggested purchase orders based on your real demand, not intuition.
No manual formulas. No spreadsheets to update. The tool does the heavy lifting so you can make decisions with clarity.
👉 Create your free account here →
Only works with Shopify. Go to the landing page, click "Create account," and connect with your Shopify account in seconds.
Final Reflection
The most important thing isn't the tool. It's the habit of reviewing the right metrics regularly and making decisions based on them. A brand with a well-used spreadsheet outperforms a brand with expensive software that nobody checks.
That said, when there's a tool that does that work for you automatically — and it's free — there's not much sense in continuing to operate in the dark.
At Cubbo, we've spent years working alongside ecommerce brands in Mexico and Latin America. We've seen up close what works and what doesn't, across operations of all sizes and categories.
If you want to explore how to improve inventory management in your specific operation, we're happy to share what we've learned. No commitment. Just a conversation between people who understand the same problems.
