Thread: Manual Inventory management - advice from developers and store managers alike.

Hi all,
I'm looking for some advice.

My client has an established routine that I am trying to match by customizing the ADNSF install. They are new to ADNSF - the new site hasn't launched yet.

Here's the situation I'm working with: the merchant has, in addition to the internet/catalog sales, 5 brick-and-mortar locations, plus an inventory warehouse. Most importantly, here, is the drop-ship capabilities of on manufacturer/distributor. If a customer orders an item that is not found in the warehouse, the inventory is pulled from the shelf at a store and sent to the warehouse. if the stores are ALSO sold out, then the item is drop-shipped from the distributor. Already you can see that I don't want to set any of the configs to hide inventory at a 'sold-out' level - or else the drop ship capabilities are useless.

I guess one of my big questions is: how would a storefront admin know when an order is placed for an item that is 'out of stock' (ie. requires drop-ship)? Thanks to an inventory control system, I know the number of items on-hand at all stores and warehouse, so I can easily set the product/variant inventory to the actual number. What good does that do me, though? As I review an order, I don't see a place, other than the receipt, that tells me what items were in the cart, let alone any tie to the inventory.

To complicate things even more, the payment is processed manually, through a POS system that is shared throughout the enterprise. I would think that charges would not be made against a card until the item is verified as drop-shipped or at least available for drop-ship. Does that sound right?

a related question: can I set the distributor on-the-fly, or set it to be smart? set, for example, a list of distributors and my priority or preference order of which to check first, based on inventory availability?

Thanks so much to any responses on this - it's a major hurdle to the store rollout!

Jason can you summarize how you have your data setup in the cart (inventory and such)?

I've got to play dumb - I haven't yet altered the out-of-the-box item or inventory control, yet.

• when a new product is added, it gets the default 10000 units as its inventory count.
• I don't have more than the default variant for any one product.
• I have the site set to display out-of-stock items but NOT display out-of-stock messages.
• inventory is not being track by color or size
• I have my inventory minimum threshold set to 0

That's about it - pretty generic, I guess. Tell me if I've missed a detail you were looking for.

On the whole, though, I am not forced into any of the above settings - I can change the threshold, default units, etc

related question: can I set the distributor on-the-fly, or set it to be smart? set, for example, a list of distributors and my priority or preference order of which to check first, based on inventory availability?

Not 'out of the box', no. Each product is either mapped to a single distributor or none at all.

You're probably looking at some customization here to handle this, there's not really a good way to do inventory from multiple sources built-in. You might want to use WSI to connect the software to the 3rd-party inventory system and just ignore the built-in inventory tracking altogether. A small app in the middle would probably make listing recent product purchases and choosing where to send them from pretty simple.