Committed vs. Available vs. On Hand Stock

[Rachel_Ward]

Hi there

Our ERP is the master of stock levels for our e-Commerce flows. It sends a new stock level to Shopify every 4 hours and this excludes any orders for which it has allocated stock but not yet dispatched. We send orders to our ERP within minutes of placing on the website, but it can take 1-4 days for the item to get dispatched and be marked as Fulfilled in Shopify.

We've automated our stock updates and have just switched to the bulk method, but can only update the 'on hand' field. Previously we had to cycle through/do calculations to post an adjustment to the 'Available' field.

Problem is that Shopify adds 'Committed' stock to 'On hand' stock to calculate the 'Available' stock level. For us this means double counting of the Unfulfilled orders in 'Committed' which we have already subtracted from our stock feed.

Is there a way of varying the setting at store level? We want to track stock between updates, but want to dictate the new stock level, as it is also being decremented by multiple B2B non-Ecommerce customers in our warehouse. Any suggestions?

Many thanks,

Rachel

[Kalen_Jordan · Accepted solution]

Hmm which ERP are you using?

You mentioned a stock feed - is it possible for the ERP to just generate that feed without pushing it to Shopify and then you can have a separate process read that feed and correctly update the stock levels in Shopify?

[Rachel_Ward]

Hi Kalen - thanks for your response. The ERP is a custom one. I was hoping I had missed a setting/workaround in Shopify, but yes,  I think we'll have to do what you suggest. Just annoying as adding complexity where it was straight forward before.

[Kalen_Jordan]

Gotcha. If you'd like any help with that, we should be able to build an automation to pull that feed in for you. This is something similar which pulls a CSV file over FTP.

[Pandur]

Hi, I am facing the same issue - also having offline/b2b customers. What solution did you decide on? 

[CandidFounders]

Rachel We solved the overselling implication of this using Draft Orders + Stock Reservation. We did a video on it here - https://youtu.be/mRUcIfXICOw

Basically what you do is create a Draft Order on Shopify from the Shopify Admin, add all of the items you want to reserve to the draft then reserve the stock. You can set a particular day to release it back, or set the date for a really long time. Once you've saved that order, to check its working have a look at the Inventory tab and see if its marked as unavailable due to the draft order you created. 

Hope that helps, thanks, Andy