Inventory Management in WooCommerce: How You Can Track Your Stock With the Shop System

1. What is inventory management?
2. How does inventory management work with WooCommerce?
3. What are the advantages and disadvantages of inventory management with WooCommerce?
4. How to set up WooCommerce inventory management
5. Tips for optimizing your WooCommerce inventory
6. Which tools are there for WooCommerce stock management or its optimization?
7. Which plugins are there for WooCommerce stock management or its optimization?

Operating an online store comes with some challenges. It can happen that inventory management between production and marketing is not given enough importance. Yet, this is the basis for functioning online commerce. Fortunately, inventory management doesn't have to be complicated, as the e-commerce plugin WooCommerce proves.

In this article, we answer all important questions about stock management with the WordPress plugin WooCommerce and provide you with a detailed guide that can help you manage your inventory effectively.

What is inventory management?

With the help of inventory management, companies determine which and how many stocks need to be ordered at what time. For this, the inventory is tracked from purchasing to selling the goods. By identifying trends, companies can also ensure that there are always enough products in stock and that they are warned in time of a shortage.

Thus, inventory management is of crucial importance to a company's performance. After all, it contributes to not having too much or too little inventory and limits the risk of shortages and inaccurate records.

The processes of inventory management depend on the type and size of a company as well as the number of products needed. So the requirements for an oil warehouse, which can store a large inventory over a long period, are significantly different from those of a food retailer with quickly perishable goods.

How does inventory management work with WooCommerce?

With WooCommerce, you always have your inventory in view. The WordPress tool is not necessarily suitable for niches, but for average shops, it is a helpful component. You also have the option to expand WooCommerce with both free and paid plugins to adjust it to your needs.

Managing your inventory in WooCommerce works as follows:

You activate the options for WooCommerce inventory tracking in your WordPress dashboard. This way, WooCommerce will automatically deduct sold items or change the status if your stocks are running low.

If necessary, you can also track stocks on a product level. For example, you can manually edit stock orders or specify that a certain product can only be purchased once.

To keep a better eye on your stocks, you also get analysis reports with details of product/variant, SKU, status, and quantity.

Note: WooCommerce automatically deducts sold items from stocks but does not add any new goods. If you get new products, you must manually update the quantities on the platform. You can easily avoid this issue by getting an additional plugin for inventory management in WooCommerce.

These are the main features of the WooCommerce inventory management system at a glance:

• Tracking of products, orders, and shipping
• Preventing over ordering
• Determining the best sellers and when the inventory needs to be restocked
• Automatic stock update
• Hiding out-of-stock items
• Comprehensive inventory reports and statistics

What are the advantages and disadvantages of inventory management with WooCommerce?

How to set up WooCommerce inventory management

First of all, you have to make sure that the options for inventory tracking are activated in the WordPress dashboard:

1. Once you have installed WooCommerce, you will see a new menu in your sidebar. Hover over it with the mouse and click on "Settings".
2. Under the settings, you will find several tabs at the top. There, click on "Products" and then on the link "Inventory" below the tab.
3. Now you have to make sure that the control field for inventory management is activated ("Enable stock management"). This allows WooCommerce to automatically adjust stocks and stock status. If you want to handle this manually, however, just leave the checkbox unchecked.

After you have met this basic prerequisite, let's take a closer look at the most important settings:

• Reserve stock (minutes): Here you can set for how many minutes the stock should be held back for unpaid orders. Once the specified period is reached, the pending order will be canceled.
• Notifications: If an item's stock is running low or is even sold out, you can specify here that the recipients will be notified by email. You can also adjust the thresholds for low or empty stocks.
• Visibility for “out of stock”:After you've activated this option, products will be hidden in your WooCommerce inventory once they are out of stock.
• Stock display format: Through this, you can enable and customize a stock display. So you can either give customers an exact indication of your stock situation or you only activate this display when a certain minimum value has been undercut.

If you want to edit every inventory individually, you should deal with the settings for individual product stocks. To do this, navigate to "Products" and then to "All Products" and select an item of your choice. Now scroll down to the product data field and click on "Inventory".

In order to customize the individual stock settings, you must first activate the option "Manage stock on product level". You have the following settings available:

• Item number: Assign a SKU number for your product
• Inventory quantity: Here stock numbers can be set manually
• Allow backorders?: Can customers order products even if they are out of stock?
• Low stock threshold: In this tab, you can adjust the low stock threshold that you have set for the product in the global settings
• Sell individually: Here you can allow customers to buy only one item at a time

Tips for optimizing your WooCommerce inventory

Managing stock is a crucial factor in the success of your business. But with so many products and data to keep track of, you can quickly lose track. Therefore, we've put together some tips for WooCommerce inventory management that can help you streamline your stock management and guarantee smooth business operations:

1. Make use of forecasts

Planning stock needs can be a difficult undertaking. If you have too much inventory, you waste money on storage costs. On the other hand, if the stock is too low, you risk losing sales. Fortunately, WooCommerce's inventory management can help eliminate the guesswork in predicting stock needs: Since you can track your sales data, WooCommerce helps you recognizing patterns and trends. These tell you when it's time to restock your shelves.

2. Synchronize your inventory across all sales channels

With WooCommerce's inventory management, you can synchronize your stocks across all your sales channels. This way, the inventory numbers are automatically updated when items are sold online or in the store, and you avoid overselling.

3. Use automatic reordering

With WooCommerce's stock management, you can automatically reorder goods when they are running low. This saves your company time because you no longer have to manually check stocks and place orders to replenish. Further, you can configure the WooCommerce stock management to send you warnings when the stock is low and needs to be refilled.

4. Save time with bulk updating products

As a business grows and its product offering increases, it becomes more difficult to keep track. One of the most useful features of WooCommerce is therefore the ability to update stock and product data in bulk. To do this, simply input the SKUs or product names of the products to be updated and WooCommerce takes care of the rest.

5. Keep only relevant plugins

If you manage your online store with WooCommerce, plugins are of utmost importance. As WordPress is teeming with plugins, store operators often activate extensions they don't really need. So just install plugins that add useful functions to your WooCommerce store. On the other hand, you should remove plugins that contribute little to your store's success.

6. Check the stock reports in WooCommerce

As mentioned before, WooCommerce provides you with useful reports. By keeping an eye on these, you always know exactly when certain items will be sold out. This way, you can avoid shortages and overstocks that can lead to shipping delays. You can also see which products sell the most based on the stock reports. To view the stock reports, click the "Reports" button on the dashboard. From there, you can navigate to the Stock tabs and see which products are in stock.

Which tools are there for WooCommerce stock management or its optimization?

As already mentioned, the functions of WooCommerce alone for your inventory management are somewhat limited. The tool is rather a first base. To manage your inventory effectively, you therefore need plugins that you can integrate into your WooCommerce shop. Here are some examples:

katana

Veeqo

Zoho Inventory

Skubana

Square for Retail

ShipStation

Which plugins are there for WooCommerce stock management or its optimization?

ATUM Inventory Management

Multi Locations Inventory Management

Product Stock Manager

Split Orders & Merge Orders

Order Tags

If you want to find more inventory management software, you've come to the right place at OMR Reviews: We've compiled tools and programs for various tasks in your company - from inventory management systems and financial planning software to e-commerce platforms.

So what are you waiting for? Visit OMR-Reviews now and discover tools that meet your business requirements.