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