Proper inventory management impossible

[Jur1]

Shopify's update regarding the inventory states (available, unavailable, commited, on hand and incoming) also implied some changes to the inventory page in the admin. However, after cracking my brains on the precise definitions of these states, I noticed that doing proper inventory management with the inventory page is about to become useless. Let me explain why.

Filter options Inventory Page

1.) As a shop owner I want to have an overview of the inventory of products from some kind of vendor. Also I want to exclude products that are not available for sale anymore (archived products or not available for sale), because I don't want to restock these items.  It appears that this kind of search is not possible anymore!

Overselling

2.) Say, when I have incoming inventory next week of products that are currently sold out, I allow some of these products to 'continue selling when out of stock' and try to sell them in advance. Okay, after a few days, inventory has arrived and I update the inventory using a transfer. But wait a second, I want to disable the option of overselling. But which products were again allowed for overselling? No way you can find them using the product or inventory page.  

Negative Stock levels

3.) Managing inventory is a tedious job and it is impossible to be 100% accurate all the time. It will happen that a customer orders a product that for some reason is not in stock. This actually implies that after this purchase your inventory is not really 0, but in fact -1. My way of dealing with these inaccuracies is to immediately change the inventory of this product to -1, so that after receiving a transfer of for example 5 items, the inventory is automatically 4 (1 is already sold). However, after the latest Shopify update, manually adjusting inventory to negative levels is not allowed. A workaround is by using a draft order and manually update inventory from there. But come on, you cannot name that a true workaround (too much work).

Graphical updates

4.) Finally, the recent graphical updates to the platform involing hiding and replacing buttons is making working with shopify rather more difficult than a easier. Okay, I'm okay with using computers, can write a decent line of code myself, but for most no-technical people working with Shopify to handle orders, every update means learning them to use the platform again and the probabilty that mistakes are made increases.

About the inventory states (available, unavailable, commited, on hand and incoming) there is quite some miscommunication going on in our wharehouse. Please reconsider the terminology used for these inventory states. For example: available for purchase, reserved, commited, total on hand and incoming)

All the best,

Jur

[SOMFootwear]

I agree with Jur1

Yes, the recent updates to the inventory interface is not useful.

1- We can't sort it the way we need it. For example: what shoes are active, with less than X in stock. Can't do that anymore.

2- Seeing what is incoming at the same time how many in stock and on order needs to be on the same page, not separated.

Please reinstate:

1- sorting

2- remove available or on hand - one is enough

3- bring back incoming on that same page

Product - Incoming - Committed - On hand

Thank you.

Thank you.

[annafaie]

I also HATE the update/release as it does not handle my Inventory management nearly as well as it did prior to this release. I want to be able to view all products by vendor > select all > bulk edit > choose columns that include the data source "inventory" and that is NO LONGER AVAILABLE. The only choice I have now to update my stock is "On Hand Quantity" which is NOT ALL helpful tp me. Please developers, revert back to the old way!!!!!

[Chris_Fawkes]

I also agree the new update is awful! Not helpful in anyway and causing us problems.

Please revert to the old version.

Duplicated from above comments>>>>>>

Please reinstate:

1- sorting

2- remove available or on hand - one is enough

3- bring back incoming on that same page

Product - Incoming - Committed - On hand

[SBWMSU]

I absolutely agree. I would like the "Availability" filter returned to the Inventory page. I don't want to review inventory levels on products I have archived, and the inventory information on the Products page is useless for restocking items with variants.

[elisat]

I'm normally a "go with the flow" kind of person and can easily adapt to tech changes...but these changes are NOT helpful!  I 100% AGREE with the above!  Inventory management is already such a pain...and now they've made it harder?? I'm already paying hundreds of dollars a month in additional apps and add ons- I don't want any more! We should be able to go to the inventory screen and see how many we have INCOMING- this one little missing column (which I imagine is super easy to add back) is missing and making inventory so much more complicated!  Also, why do we now have to click on the search box to open a search box?  Was it really taking up that much space to just have it exist at the top of the screen?  PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE revert it ALL back!!!

[SOMFootwear]

It has been more  than 10 days since the changes have occurred on Shopify and from the first comment here and still, no one from Shopify has contributed to this post. 149 views and several comments. The China holiday is over...are we going to hear anything soon?

[Trevor]

Hey, everyone. 

Thanks for raising your concerns about the changes to the inventory area. We've responded in more detail to explain the changes on this thread. 

We're aiming to keep the conversation in one place and avoid multiple threads being created for the same topic. If you have additional feedback to share about this feature, then please follow up on the primary thread. 

Thank you!