What's the best inventory app for tracking low stock and custom packaging?

[JuanBingo]

Hi everyone—

We are looking for a very simple inventory app to solve two problems.

1-Tracking low stock with daily emails or alerts; forecasting would be great but not necessary

2- I'm not sure what to call this (it's not bundling in the traditional sense) but when we sell an item, it always comes with custom packaging. We do stationary, so every card comes with an envelope, and sets of cards come wrapped in a paper band. But we don't ever (and won't ever) sell just the bands or the envelopes so it isn't a public facing product or a bundle. But we *do* want to track these items in our inventory. It should be pretty simple, they are all 1:1 with our products. Right now we are doing it all manually, and we are usually too busy to do a good job keeping up we run out of things all the time and it leads to delays.

The important thing I'm looking for is an app that does both of these things. We don't need a lot of other bells and whistles. No upselling or bundling discounts etc. 

Thanks in advance,

John 

[Mete]

Hi @JuanBingo,

Our Merchbees Low Stock Alert app meets your needs. https://apps.shopify.com/merchbees-low-stock-alert

Merchbees sent an email to you when your item's stock below your chosen threshold.
You can set scheduled alerts, or you receive an alert as soon as when an item's inventory level goes below the stock threshold.

A few other things you can do with our app:

1. Create various email alerts for different items and recipients with CSV files.
2. Filter products/variants using multiple filters; collection, vendor, tag, product, or variant.
3. Set alert for a single location or multi-location.
4. Set alert based on both variant's stock and the total stock of the product.
5. See all the low stock items on the web report.

Happy to answer any questions.
Thanks

[JuanBingo]

Mete, this sounds great for inventory, but it doesn't seem like there's a "bundling" option, is that right? I'm kinda hoping to find both functions in one app.

[productsync]

Hi John

For point 2 you would bundle up each product or variant with the components that make it up. The components don't have to be available to purchase online so you can keep them hidden as separate products. This is a common scenario that users set up using our bundle app.

Once an order comes through we unbundle the order (if it contains a product bundle) and we list the individual components as order lines. This lets you fulfil and also track inventory correctly.

We actually also have restock reports built into our main app so can always unlock that component too if needed. You just need to set every product up with the warning level and we then give you a list of what products have fallen below. You can also create purchase orders directly from the report using our system.

If you would like to test it out please get in touch.

Regards

Tom

[Florio5]

Best Free Inventory Management Software for 2021

1. Odoo: Best for warehouse management and dropshipping businesses.
2. Zoho Inventory: Best for growing businesses and retailers.
3. Square: Best for tracking unlimited products.
4. Boxstorm: Best for small SKU counts and QuickBooks connectivity.

[Florio5]

Best Free Inventory Management Software for 2021

1. Odoo: Best for warehouse management and dropshipping businesses.
2. Zoho Inventory: Best for growing businesses and retailers.
3. Square: Best for tracking unlimited products.
4. Boxstorm: Best for small SKU counts and QuickBooks connectivity.
5. RapidFS

[JuanBingo]

Hey Tom, thanks for the reply. 

You guys at ChannelUp seem to have a ton of functions in the app and if I'm understanding you right, it has everything we would need. I've looked at the app before, but I'm worried it actually does *too* much. We'd be paying for a bunch of things we're simply just not big enough to need. 

I'm new to the app space here, so I may have that wrong. Do you guys have simple add ons? Or is it one package?

Thanks,

John 

[productsync · Accepted solution]

Hey John

The cost of the bundleup app will be enough to get you set up on our restock report as well. The pricing on the Channelup site is more of a guide. We tailor the costs to the data flows. If you don't have a million products you should be ok in not costing us money!

We are publishing more smaller apps but for now just bundleup is on the app store. There are a number of restock alert apps so might be just as easy to get one of those separately. 

Regards

Tom

[JuanBingo]

Thanks Tom! We'll give it a try first thing tomorrow. 

[ericsda]

Hi @JuanBingo ,
What solution did you end up using?

Btw, I am working on a solution to help sellers with inventory tracking and drop the spreadsheet, especially bundles like the use case you mentioned. Marking the envelope and paper band as child parts to the card. 

I would love to chat and learn more about your business to get feedback on my solution and maybe help you out right away. Let me know what you think

[adam_bn]

Highly recommend Stocklink for point 2. You can automatically update/sync inventory for connected products/product groups.

https://apps.shopify.com/stocklink

[sensible-tools]

It's worth checking out Sensible Inventory Forecasting for point 1 - it helps keep an eye on all the products and you can receive reports weekly or daily with your inventory status. The forecasting part is actually quite important as you grow - you'll start having products that sell significantly more than others so you would want a higher low stock alert for these products.

Obviously you can manually set those but with forecasting, you just have to set the lead time and safety stock and the the adjusting will happen automatically based on the demand to make sure you never run out of stock.