Variant quantity no longer appears in CSV exports

[PerAndersE]

I work for a physical retail shop that carries a lot of individual products second-hand and often need to use a CSV to update details and inventory quantity as well as print labels for all the items in the store, which happens on a daily basis (not all items, just newly received products as we buy from the public).

Recently we have come to a point where we will be opening up a 2nd location and have started to set things in limbo in order to prep for the new location, so we created a new shop location to keep a proper inventory for what's where. When we did this, among other issues we're having, the Quantity column disappeared from the CSV and while we can re-add it and it functions as needed for new adjustments, it's very inconvenient to have to hunt down the right information in order to keep everything properly inventoried. That's not the important part though...

We use the exported CSVs convert to our label printing software and print our custom labels and quantity is very important for this as we often have multiple variants of the same item and multiple of the same variant that will get price adjusted when we receive new stock, so we will print labels for all versions of an item in stock at the same time. While we could consider using the inventory tab instead, there is no "Sort by Updated / Newest" option for inventory so we have to individually find all the most recent edits and export it that way, but we are frequently processing 50+ different items at a time and if I had to guess, we have well over 50,000 different items so trying to find the 50 items we just modified and all their variants by the sort options on the inventory tab is extremely inconvenient. 

Point is: How can we get the quantity to reappear in the CSVs or sort the inventory manager by recently updated? This is causing a lot of headache for me and my team.

[Jordan_Pimsical]

Hi,

Are you using a specific app for this? As you mentioned inventory manager I wasn't sure if you were or not?

If you'd like to export this information you've got some options available in Shopify, which I'll explain below.

Shopify Export 

If you want to use just Shopify tools for this.
You can sort by Updated in the products tab, this might give you the order you're looking for and then you can export say the first 50 items or 2 pages for example. If you don't need the quantity figure this would work for you.

Or you could export from the products and inventory in Shopify and combine the excels using VLOOKUP for example.

Matrixify

Depending on the number of products you have, you could use the Matrixify app https://apps.shopify.com/excel-export-import

You would then be able to create an export which combines your product and inventory information like so:

You could also add the updated at column here which you could then sort on.

There may be some cost associated here depending on how many products/inventory you'd like to export. 

[PerAndersE]

The issue here is that I do need the quantity but only for a select few items and their variants. Since we have so many different items, it would be a lot of unnecessary extra work just to match up the 20-50 items that we need in that moment, and just exporting our entire inventory to get the exact variants we need would take quadruple the time that it takes to get the data and print our labels as needed.

We aren't able to add any apps to do it without the permission of our owner, so Matrixify is not really an option in this moment, but if it were, it does look like a good one to explore.

I just wish it was easier to get in contact with Shopify directly, because if they could just add a sort option to Inventory or a way to export inventory quantity for a specific location in the main Products page, it would solve this whole issue.

[SupportDC]

Hi PerAndersE,
If you're open to using a third-party app, DataChamp could be a solution for you. It lets you customize your export and include specific columns such as Quantity (On hand). You can also sort the data by various fields. If you have any questions or need assistance setting it up, feel free to reach out! 

[dataease]

You might take a look at DataEase.
With it you can:
- export Products or Variants filtered by “Created At” or “Updated At” so you only pull the 50-ish items you just edited;
- include any inventory-location Quantity columns you need in the CSV;
- re-import the same file after bulk edits to push the changes back to Shopify.

Should save you from hunting for the right rows every day. If you’d like to try it, feel free to reach out and I’ll help you set up the export template in a few minutes.

[PerAndersE]

If we had the permission from the owner to add more apps to our admin, this one looks like the best option I've seen, especially with how robust the Free version seems to be.

Thank you!