The power of the carousel

We are just getting a corousel system implemented in our warehouse. After years of running around the building to fill our parts orders, it's become too cumbersome finding things. This means that we're now going to allow the parts to come to us. With a platform that raises and lowers, we'll have people waiting at the end of 70' long carousels for the parts to come to them, then light up a bin number and a quantity next to the shelf that is supposed to have parts pulled from it. That's all fine and dandy, but what's the best about this is that it becomes tougher for people to make pulling errors, so we'll not only be able to ship out more orders per day, but also have fewer errors and store more inventory. Considering that we've got well over 100% more sales than just 12 months ago, this will be important as we move forward.

After getting top rankings for many of the most obvious key phrases for our site, there are still so many combinations available that I'm expecting to be able to double to triple our volume yet. If that continues, just counting the parts as they arrive is going to be a huge task. Both exciting and scary at the same time.

When we started building this site, I wasn't sure it would ever grow to a substantial sales volume. After all, how many people are competent enough to repair their own tools, let alone have the desire. Boy, were we all shocked when sales started taking off. That was even before we started really concentrating on SEO. After SEO, we're doing more in a month than I ever really thought we'd be doing in a year through this site. Now that I have more experience and insight, I think we're leaving a whole lot of business out on the table yet. I can seriously think of thousands of phrases that we're not showing up at all yet that would be decently converting phrases. Just about the time I think we're doing well, I start thinking about everything we're still missing. Amazing how much my attitude has changed.

Now that I've seen the volume we can do in parts, doing many times that volume in tools seems like it should be very easy. Granted, we're one of the few that sell parts online, but there aren't too many that know much about SEO and sell tools online. Put some accessories on the carousel and we can start moving through those in large quantities as well. It just seems like now that we have a carousel system, we should put almost everything on there. Obviously pallets of nails don't belong on a carousel, but it'd do a great job for smaller tools (drills, grinders, etc.) Table saws would be pushing it. Staplers would be great on a carousel.

I don't know how many companies in our industry use a carousel system, but I'm fairly certain that it isn't that many. Very exciting stuff, and it gets more exciting every day.

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