EXCLUSIVE: The most challenging inventory issues are…
A new survey identifies several key challenges facing inventory management professionals.
Seasonal and perishable goods, demand forecasting, stockouts and tariffs are just a few of the issues keeping inventory management professionals up at night. Results of a new survey of inventory management professionals from cloud platform provider DOSS exclusively released to Chain Store Age reveal the details of the main problems facing respondents.
Highlights follow:
Categories
Seasonal or trend-driven SKUs and perishable goods are tied as the most stressful inventory categories to manage among retail professionals, each cited by 33% of respondents. Other product categories cited as causing stress include import-dependent goods (29%), promotional or campaign-tied stock (26%) and private label products (16%).
More than half of respondents (51%) agreed that seasonal inventory had become harder to manage over the past three years. Another 29% said seasonal and trend-driven volatility had intensified their inventory stress.
Demand forecasting
More than half of respondents (51%) said their organizations have sometimes proceeded with demand forecasts they knew were unreliable because no better alternative existed. Another 16% said they did not formally measure forecast accuracy at all.
[READ MORE: IHL Group: Inventory issues cause $1.7T in annual losses]
The most common responses to forecasting misses were:
- Adjusting future forecasting methodology: 19%
- Discounting aggressively to move inventory: 17%
- Redirecting to secondary channels: 10%
- Accepting the write-off and moving on: 8%
- Conducting a formal post-mortem: 8%
- Escalating to executive leadership: 6%
Among organizations writing off inventory monthly or more, 23% said nothing formal happens after a major forecasting miss.
Tariffs
Half of respondents have delayed or canceled purchase orders because of tariff uncertainty, while another 25% considered adjusting orders but ultimately held off. Tariffs were also the top disruptor to demand forecasting (19%).
Visibility
Nearly one-in-five (18%) respondents relied on four or more systems to assemble a complete picture of inventory health. More than half (55%) said a lack of real-time visibility directly caused a business problem at least a few times over the past year. Another 10% said these issues occurred monthly or more often.
Nearly two-thirds of respondents (63%) said their teams shared a consistent view of inventory data, while 51% expressed confidence in their ERP system's ability to identify shelf-life risk in real time.
Stockouts
Half of respondents said they feel more pressure to avoid stockouts than excess inventory. Nearly the same share (49%) said their organizations tend to overbuy as a direct result. At the same time, 40% of respondents believed more than 10% of their inventory was at risk of becoming unsellable at any given time.
Nearly one-quarter (24%) of respondents were overbuying to avoid stockouts while already believing a meaningful share of their inventory could become dead stock. More than half (54%) wrote off unsellable inventory at least once per quarter.
Viral trends
Nearly three-in-five applicable respondents (58%) said they had either been left holding excess inventory after a viral trend faded or had come dangerously close. Among respondent organizations hit by viral inventory gluts, 74% needed between one and six months to recover, while 6% never fully recovered and ultimately wrote off the inventory.
TikTok drove the majority of those inventory swings (60%), followed by Instagram (13%) and YouTube (7%). More than half (55%) of retail and wholesale respondents have delayed or canceled orders due to faded viral trends, compared to 45% of direct-to-consumer and 44% of omnichannel respondents.
Artificial intelligence
Overall, 64% of respondents had not deployed AI or machine learning tools for inventory management at the time of the survey. Adoption gaps were biggest among respondents from smaller organizations, where 79% of companies under $10 million in revenue had not adopted AI tools compared to 56% of companies generating $250 million or more.
Among respondents with no plans to adopt AI, a leading 59% say it's just not a current priority. Other major reasons (more than one response allowed) include:
- Lack of technical infrastructure: 23%
- Budget or cost constraints: 21%
- Distrust of AI outputs/concern about losing human control: 21%
- Lack of internal alignment or organizational buy-in: 13%
This survey was conducted in May 2026 using CloudResearch Connect and Prolific. A total of 661 qualified responses were collected and analyzed.
