Inventory management - when I provide product on consignment to other stores

[YuNick]

Hi Guru's, 

I hope you can help. I have about 20+ stores that sell my products on my behalf as a consignee. I am the consignor and give them product I have made, they sell it and make a margin off the sale price. Usually we account monthly and they pay me the balance after taking off their margin they make. 

My problem is accounting for this in my Shopify online store.

For Shopify I show stock in my factory, that I have on hand to fulfil any online orders through my website. But, I can't add my stock out with my consignees as that is held by them for sale, not me, so only for sale at their shop. 

So, currently, my online store and website only lists stock actually held with me.

I have a separate stock inventory system called StoreHub that does allow me to capture total stock, and then identifies whether I hold it or it is at one of my consignees.  But, this is not natively integrated with shopify.

Other than keeping a separate spreadsheet with a tab for each of my consignees, listing stock they hold, is there any way to capture all this in Shopify? I would prefer to use the one system for easy inventory management and data analysis benefits of course.

Thank you for any suggestions 🙂

[SpeedyDev]

@YuNick 

Welcome to Shopify Community,

We are happy to help you,

there are multiple app that will manage your Inventory System,

https://apps.shopify.com/multi-store-inventory-sync

https://apps.shopify.com/multi-source-inventory

if you can't able to use the inventory app, then have a team they will manage your inventory,

Let me know if you need any more help.

Thank you.

[YuNick]

thank you, I will check them out to see if they suit my needs 🙂

[YuNick]

Thank you again for your kind suggestions. However they do not work for stock sent out to a consignee. The consignee runs their own stock control or inventory management system. So, mine will not talk to it. Basically I give say 20 products to 10 consignees, that is 200 products I no longer have at my factory for me to sell from my online store. The 10 consignees have all that stock and update me monthly on what has sold. I need a way of using Shopify or an additional app, to show me what I have on hand for sale in my store, and also capture what is out with my consignees, even if I need do a monthly update of stock with all of them to find out what sold.  At least that way I know what stock I can sell and what stock is with them to sell. I don't want my store to show stock for sale that is not actually on hand with me. Getting it back from a consignee is not always easy especially if they are in another country. 

Any thoughts on an easy workaround other than manual monthly spreadsheets of stock with consignees and only showing in my online store only the stock I have on hand with me?

Thank you 🙂

[Adriendriver]

Hi YuNick,

Did you succeed to figure out a way to do what you describe? I have the exact same need than you have and I have been struggling to find a decent solution...

[YuNick]

sadly no, I have to run 2 systems, unbelievable really for such a mature software solution and a common issue I would have thought 😞

[DonnaS]

Hi there,

Im not sure what your budget is like but an OMS such as Orderbot can handle these complex inventory management scenarios

[Gussy]

@YuNick did you ever find a solution to this issue? I'm having the same challenge at the moment. Thanks 🙂

[YuNick]

alas no, am still running a very manual system 😞

[starlitdreamer]

I don't know if this would work for your situation, but I've used locations to identify inventory that is on consignment. I haven't used it in a while, but I think I used the inventory transfer feature to transfer inventory to the off-site location.