Inventory Hades

I am antiques and collectibles dealer.  I scour garage sales, auctions, and thrift stores for underloved items and foster the little things until we can find them the proper home.  I also have a new toy store on Amazon.  So I have a varied amount of inventory for four different online stores scatter around my home most of the time!

When my family and I first discovered that this was actually going to be a business and not just a passing fancy, it became apparent we needed to find a way to store the stores!  The first bright idea was to buy clear bins.  Since we could see through them, we should be able to find what we need right? Yeah o.k. that doesn’t work unless you can afford a LOT of clear bins, and then only if you have x-ray vision to see through what’s in front of the item you are actually looking for.

O.k. Paper boxes. They are free from the real job.  They stack nicely…and now my house looks like I am perpetually in the process of moving.   However, they do work for most items, and you can put the name of each store on them so you know where to look for the item by what store sold it.

When one store ends up with more than nine boxes, your shipping department (in my case my husband) starts to complain about having to dig through all nine boxes to find the item we just sold.  Hmm…now what?

Current plan!  Go through and put a code and a number on each box.  The first AntiquiHut Box can be AH1.  Now go through each AntquiHut listing and put the code for the box the item is in on the item listing.  That way when the item sells I should be able to tell the shipping department to look in box AH1.

This is what we are currently trying.  I’ll let you know how it goes.

By the way, welcome to my blog.  I’m hoping to share a little more of how this antiques/toys business works for me..and my family.  Enjoy my mistakes, and hey,  maybe we can all come up with better ways.

All the Best,

DiscussAntiques