Sometimes you need to decide what to do with products that just won't "move."

Many of the larger publishers have made substantial changes in how they handle returns by giving your store the opportunity to mark down the selling price of a product and protect your margin—even though it is at a lower retail price.

By doing this, you not only create a great sale opportunity for your store and customers, you avoid the cost of boxing up and returning product. And, best of all, you create cash for your store instead of a credit on your account for which you have to complete extra paperwork.

Before you can decide whether marking down or returning product is the wisest decision, you have to know what's moving and what's not.

Whether your store has a point-of-sale (P.O.S.) system or not, you need to cycle-count your inventory. This means going through a section of your inventory—usually with a printout from your P.O.S. system—to check your actual inventory against what your system says you have.

If the product hasn't sold after six months, the chances of it selling are slim to none. Lose your emotional attachment and the romanticism of the title, and think of it as cash just sitting on the shelf.

By regularly going through your inventory, you are searching for capital that is tied up in old, obsolete inventory and converting it to cash.

This enables you to recycle those dollars into new inventory that will sell though. It won't just recoup your original investment but also will allow you to generate margin on those sales—margin that falls down to your bottom line.

Remember that as you think about cleaning up your inventory, the worst thing you can do is nothing.

-Joe Questel is vice president of sales and business development at Symtio and a longtime industry professional.

-Read the complete article here.