How can I manage inventory control for variant stock levels?

[CrossoverOnline]

Hi there,

I am looking for an app that will help manage online inventory.
As soon as stock on a variant is lower than 3, the item needs to show as out of stock or unavailable.
Currently, only when a total across all sizes is lower than a certain amount then it shows out of stock.

Is there an app that can help with this?

I will look forward to your appreciated assistance.

[Kalen_Jordan]

Out of curiosity, why are you wanting to have that buffer of 3 before showing as out of stock? Is it because you're trying to avoid overselling by accident?

[CrossoverOnline]

That is correct yes. We have a number of stores nationally and we don't
always keep all the stock at a warehouse level.

The system is currently syncing with stock available at the warehouse and
the stores and it might just happen that an online customer and purchases an
item that someone is buying in-store.

Ultimately, we don't wish to oversell and we will even increase the
threshold of items up to 10 if need be.

[Kalen_Jordan]

Gotcha and how often does the sync happen? Are the in-store purchases through a POS that can tie into Shopify?

Sorry I know I'm not answering your original question. Just trying to think through what the best overall solution is. Obviously you might just want a quicker fix.

You could automatically disable the product pretty easily based on the min inventory level, but you probably want to do it at the variant level. I'm actually thinking maybe the best way to do this is when you set the inventory level in Shopify from your warehouse, just subtract 3 at that point. That way all of the out of stock stuff will just work out of the box.

[CrossoverOnline]

The sync was supposed to happen immediately. The owner of the POS system
promised that much but for some reason, if the product ID from the POS
doesn't match the ID of the item on Shopify, then the sync won't happen at
all.

As soon as items are sold in-store, it pushes that minus back into the POS
of course, and then updates the available quantity online.

We could just subtract the 3 or whatever other number we'll set it to. We
would like an app to automate this process though so instead of across the
variants, it should be o a variant level.

[Kalen_Jordan]

Gotcha. Yeah I think our app should be able to help to automate the process, depending on what the POS is. I could build out the automation template for you.

Happy to discuss in more detail here or via email/dms.

[gr_trading]

Hi @CrossoverOnline 

The best would be to list your stock less.

However if you still looking for fix.

Here is the flow, product variants object contains the inventory value.

inventory_quantity

We can custom code in theme for your logic and mark the product out of stock.

Hope this will help...

[Tahar]

Hi @CrossoverOnline 

One way to solve your challenge would be to subtract fixed values from your existing stock values. This would work but you would need an SOP for your staff so they know the inventory levels in Shopify do not reflect the actual physical stock. 

Another alternative would be to use an affordable inventory management system that has support for buffer stock and can connect to Shopify. We, at Stock&Buy, can help with this - we integrate with Shopify and provide support for buffer stock levels (these can either be changed one product at a time or in bulk). Buffer stock can be defined per location which is quite helpful if you need safety stock per location. Happy to give you a demo to see this in action, just ping me at tahar@stockandbuy.com

(Disclosure: I am the CEO and Co-Founder of the company)

kind regards,

Tahar

[mtp1]

Can you solve for this with Shopify's safety stock feature? 

If your true on hand inventory is 100 and you want your buffer to be 10, you can add 10 to safety stock and make 90 available for purchase. When people by 90 units of your product, the product will show as out of stock.

The one annoyance is that by default, if you add 10 safety stock to a 100 on hand units, Shopify will show 110 on hand units and 100 available. So you will need to adjust it to 100 on hand and 90 available with a few clicks.