Manage inventory between Warehouse and Amazon FBA Replenishment

Technical Q&A
1

Situation:

I order bulk from suppliers and store the inventory in my garage (Shopify location 1). I will send pieces of that inventory to Amazon FBA, Walmart Fulfillment Services and another 3pl provider. Currently, I just do occasional inventory counts in the garage and change the numbers via spreadsheet in order to reduce the numbers and reflect what I have in the garage. It was suggested in the past to do inventory transfers but I use shopify’s Amazon Marketplace to track inventory that is at the amazon warehouses so that auto updates and a transfer will not work because it’s not a “location” in my shopify account. Doing the spreadsheet takes so much time with manual changes

Help Request:

Does anyone know a way to help automate the inventory changes when I send inventory out from my location to another provider where Shopify already syncs the inventory?

Thanks

2

I don’t think it’s possible, at least on the Amazon side because the inventory is synced based on what’s in your FBA.

Couple ideas to help organize that:

  1. You could put a column in your spreadsheet that you’re managing, something like “pending inbound inventory”

  2. If you wanted to store it in Shopify, you could add a tag to the product, something like “Inbound 500”, then if you search for products with tag “Inbound” you can see all the products with that tag and their count.

For automation, there could be a way to build a custom app with an interface where you enter the inventory and product, then the app would adjust the inventory of your location 1, but it would probably be overkill to create an app just for that purpose.

I work with automation (lead developer of the Shopify app Order Automator), if you want me to try to look into that and see if there’s anything my team can automate for you, send a message to https://orderautomator.com/contact and mention this post. We can analyze the requirement details and see if there’s anything we can do to help (either with the app, or a custom app, or maybe even ideas or a script to help part of it).