Hello!
I grow/sell perishable live shellfish that propose unique inventory problems. I’m in the process of migrating to Zoho Inventory and expanding my Shopify store to include B2B ordering options for a perishable product. Currently, our Shopify site caters only to D2C orders and I’m seeking advice to find the right combination of tools/apps/services to take into account the below details and address the following challenges:
Future Receiving Date in Zoho:
Purchase orders will be entered into Zoho Inventory with a future receiving date.
Ordering Based on Ship/Delivery Date:
B2B and D2C customers on Shopify will place orders based on their preferred shipping/delivery date for the week (perhaps these would be considered ‘pre-orders’). It seems that most apps/shopify treat a store’s inventory as a current condition without considering the future availability of inventory scheduled to be received before the selected shipping date of their order.
Selling Unreceived Products:
We need the ability to sell products even if the PO hasn’t been officially “received” yet but only for orders with a ship/delivery date after the anticipated receiving date of the corresponding purchase order for that product.
Priority-Based Inventory Allocation:
Products used to fulfill orders should prioritize the closest purchase order date before the customer’s ship/delivery date for their order and then work backward, following a FIFO-like approach, thus allowing us to continue selling earlier purchase orders for orders shipping out earlier in the week.
Example Scenario:
For instance, if we’re receiving 500 units on Monday and 300 units on Thursday, and a customer selects a Friday delivery date - we should have 800 units available to sell to them. If they selected Tuesday as their delivery date, we would only have 500 units to sell to them.
If that customer then places an order on Sunday for 400 units and selects Friday delivery, the inventory levels should first use the 300 units arriving on Thursday and then use 100 units from the Monday delivery. This ensures we can continue selling the remaining 400 units from Monday’s purchase order throughout the entire week instead of the system saying that there are only 100 units available until the new units are received on Thursday.
For anyone logging into the system AFTER the above order was placed, they would see that only 400 oysters are remaining for any ship/delivery day that week
Handling Multiple Products with Shared SKU Inventory:
Our B2B products are usually just one type of unit, but our D2C products are often a bundle or combination of a few different products that we have in stock, like a variety pack of shellfish for example. We use the ‘Materials Inventory’ app which easily handles this situation for our D2C side, but need to make sure that our new system for B2B can accommodate this fact.
Inventory Visibility
We must be able to have a way on Zoho to know how much of each SKU we have available to sell/ship each day of the week (remaining inventory + POs delivered that day) in addition to being able to see physical inventory on hand even if some have been accounted for in orders shipping in the future
B2B Login
Ability for B2B customers to log into their account on shopify and see past orders, see what’s available and pricing for the week, edit their account, etc.
B2B Segmenting and Pricing:
B2B customers need to be able to be segmented based on shipping/delivery options for their location and each of those shipping/delivery options then dictate which days they can select to have their product shipped/delivered.
Example: We deliver directly in our delivery vans to local customers only on Tuesday (with an order cut off of Sunday 6pm) and Friday (order cut off Wednesday 6pm). We ship via UPS/FEDEX to customers outside of our delivery range they can select to have product shipped out on Monday through Thursday with a cutoff of 8am the day of shipping.
Each group should have distinct pricing for the products - pricing should be a sync’d from Zoho and NOT a manual upload to an app/program. Ideally, we would have the ability to have price rules for each customer for the special cases where we negotiate a certain price with a specific customer.
Order Limits for B2B:
We need the flexibility to set minimum order limits for B2B orders based on their group, such as requiring a minimum order of $250 per order.
Order Cut-Off Times/Dates:
Based on the shipping method selected (for D2C customers) or dictated by their customer group (for B2B customers), there will be certain cutoff times/dates.
Example: direct delivery for Tuesday has a cut-off date/time of Sunday at 6pm.
Parcel shipping has a cutoff of 8am for same day shipping.
We would need the ability to custom select off-cycle blackout dates for reasons like holiday weeks where our normal shipping and delivery dates available are altered
Any guidance or recommendations on tools, apps, or strategies to handle these complexities would be greatly appreciated. Shopify forums are such a great community of incredibly helpful people…