Inventory management on Shopify

[BrightIdeas]

I've recently migrated over to Shopify from Magento, and I haven't yet worked out how best to deal with inventory management and stock ordering. We have a catalogue of about 1500 SKUs, but sell perhaps 80% of those SKUs infrequently. This means I need to really keep on top of inventory, which is a bit of a pain.

In Magento, I used to download product performance data (by vendor) as well as inventory by SKU data. Then, I copied both data sets downloaded into a single spreadsheet, which I used for the basis of working out how much stock I needed to order from any particular supplier.

Not sure what app might be best. Or, if there's a semi-efficient way of doing this natively in Shopify?

Any advice appreciated!

 

[Solve My Problem]

There are a bunch of ways to do this

You can go down the manual route downloading, within Shopify you can export inventory data which will give you a CSV file with the name, SKU and inventory number

You could than have another excel sheet run a macro to read this data in, VLOOKUP the SKU and then highlight SKU's needing to re-order.

Bit messy but the cheap solution but similar to what you already used.

You also have the option of using a stock management system but these will be in the region £100+ a month. These are more automated and do save you a lot of time when setup.

You also have the option of a bespoke app. This has an initial cost but a much lower monthly cost and can be setup exactly as you want it.

I write bespoke software for Shopify so that tends to be my go to option for most people unless they truly don't need anything but a manual option (small number of SKUs etc..) If they need a manual option I would normally work with them to get an excel system working as well as it can without going too deep into it.

You can always go bells and whistles with this but in my view it should always start as simple as it can whilst working. As time goes on you can then add to it, but no point spending a bunch of time and money into features that you may not use down the line. Always best to start with the minimum product.

The benefit is that you can set it and leave it, have a daily report or an email or even generate the default text for an email to send to order etc.. one of the systems I wrote actually placed the order via the suppliers website in real time (it actually logged in and added the items to the cart, the owner could then finalise the order)

If purchase orders are created via a bespoke system they can then update the stock when it arrives etc.. but that is something I would add at a later date to be honest as per above.

If you want to talk through the various options happy to run through them with you. I do a lot with Shopify for others as well as our own businesses and have used the expensive options as well as the manual side of things

Darren

 

[BrightIdeas]

Hi Darren

Thanks for the comprehensive reply. Yes, the first option (VLOOKUP the SKU) was how I approached it last time. I'm not sure how I download product performance data (filtered by 'contains XXX' in SKU, as well as other criteria) to make this work though? I'm on the Shopify plan, not the Shopify Advanced plan, so don't have access to advanced reports.

 

[Solve My Problem]

Hi Darren

Thanks for the comprehensive reply. Yes, the first option (VLOOKUP the SKU) was how I approached it last time. I'm not sure how I download product performance data (filtered by 'contains XXX' in SKU, as well as other criteria) to make this work though? I'm on the Shopify plan, not the Shopify Advanced plan, so don't have access to advanced reports.

The best option is a bespoke system to keep track of sales etc.. it can access the data and then provide historic data, it can just save inventory changes to calculate the usage. I wrote something similar years ago for Magento. It would just keep track of orders and then gave an estimate of stock that should be held. It ignored large orders and very small orders so gave an average. These things are never perfect but it meant we had enough stock 90% of the time.

The manual way is to download inventory every day, and then run a comparison against the numbers using Excel to do a similar thing.

The basic Shopify plans are all 99.9% of people need I wouldn't worry about that.

Darren

 

[Solve My Problem]

A more manual way is if you go to

Analytics -> Reports -> Inventory -> Sell-through rate by product

This will show you sales of individual products which you can export.

 

[BrightIdeas]

A more manual way is if you go to

Analytics -> Reports -> Inventory -> Sell-through rate by product

This will show you sales of individual products which you can export.

This looks promising! This gives the product performance data that I had before in Magento. However, I can't seem to download a 'clean' feed of all products by vendor, as there's loads of superfluous rows of data. Perhaps that isn't doable?

 

[fisicx]

This looks promising! This gives the product performance data that I had before in Magento. However, I can't seem to download a 'clean' feed of all products by vendor, as there's loads of superfluous rows of data. Perhaps that isn't doable?

Just run a filter on the downloaded file to remove all the bits you don’t need.

 

[Solve My Problem]

This looks promising! This gives the product performance data that I had before in Magento. However, I can't seem to download a 'clean' feed of all products by vendor, as there's loads of superfluous rows of data. Perhaps that isn't doable?

A manual option is to goto the inventory

Filter by Vendor, then you can then save the view, you can export this.

If you export all the products you get all the SKU's and stock.

All the data is there, it's just a mater of filtering and using excel to combine the data etc...

It can be done using the API and a custom app to just export data you need/want etc... it all depends if you want a semi automated solution or you are happy spending time doing something on a regular basis.

 

[capacitum.com]

Hi,
I would suggest looking into something called Inventory Planner. It can plug into your Shopify store or with most WMS systems. This is an amazing piece of kit, that is able to forecast your inventory based on your sales history. No need to do any excel work. They have a free trial so its worth checking out.

 

[BrightIdeas]

Hi,
I would suggest looking into something called Inventory Planner. It can plug into your Shopify store or with most WMS systems. This is an amazing piece of kit, that is able to forecast your inventory based on your sales history. No need to do any excel work. They have a free trial so its worth checking out.

Thanks, will check it out.

 

[BrightIdeas]

Just to circle back to this, just in case it's of interest to anyone finding themselves in the same situation, I have now started using Matrixify (for data exporting/importing) and Report Toaster. Still need to use Excel spreadsheets, but it's a way to access the data in lots of different ways. But, I'll take a look at alternative systems once I'm at that stage...