Do you ever wonder when is the best time to increase your pricing? Or when you should finally get rid of old inventory items? 

Today’s show is all about purchasing, pricing, and purging your inventory.  Cam and Kaley are giving their best tips + tricks, as they’ve worked together over the years to find a rhythm for navigating all things inventory.

Price Increases

It’s important to look at increasing your pricing annually or biannually.  There are a lot of reasons why rental companies should increase their pricing, the first being inflation.  When we see costs of goods going up, we need to increase our pricing as well.  For example, wood prices right now are 3x higher than normal.  Not to mention, shipping prices are through the roof.  All of these factors raise our cost, which means we need to increase what we are renting items for!

Before you increase your inventory pricing, download a report from your software of all your inventory with:

Item name

How much you purchased it for

Your rental price

How much that item has made you so far

Then, add a column for the new price. If you don’t have a software that downloads a report for you, then you may have to create one on a spreadsheet.  It’s important to track this information so that you can stay on top of your inventory!

How to Increase Your Inventory Pricing

There are a couple different ways you can increase your pricing. 

1. Percentage based — With this method, you just increase all of your items up 10-15% 

2. Per item based on usage — With this method, you take into account the usage of each item and increase on a case-by-case basis.

Remember: You’ll usually increase your pricing, but sometimes you need to lower pricing too! Last year, we had to decrease some pricing due to the pandemic.  You may also do some market research and notice that you are priced way too high for your market. Make sure you do lots of research before pricing your inventory.

In your pricing discussion, also determine if you will have set pricing for multiple day rentals or if you’ll just charge a fee for multiple days. You should also look at your service fees and determine if those need to be adjusted as well.

Purging Inventory

Purging your inventory is so necessary as a rental company.  You have to move inventory out as trends change and things get damaged.  It allows you to have more room (& money!) for new inventory pieces! We use our software, Goodshuffle Pro, for reporting how well a piece is performing.  If the piece is no longer renting, figure out why and either:

1. Repurpose the item — Repaint the item or reuse the wood for another project.  
2. Rename it  —  Sometimes a simple name change will catch your clients’ eyes!
3. Increase the marketing — Sometimes we all just need a reminder! Post a photo of the item on your Instagram.
4. Sell it off — If it just won’t work for your business, sell it off! We love doing Instagram sales or Facebook Marketplace.

If you want to know more about pricing your inventory, listen to this EXCLUSIVE episode from Rental Biz Academy.