There’s no question about it, tracking your inventory is important to your business. If you rely on e-commerce and use the Shopify platform, you likely know Shopify has a lot of different tools you can use to manage your business. While Shopify is awesome as an e-commerce solution, what about Shopify inventory management?
How can you manage your inventory in Shopify?
Shopify In-House
Another great benefit for using Shopify is the in-house features.
One such feature is the INVENTORY section in Shopify.
Inventory tracking can help you avoid selling products that have run out of stock, or let you know when you need to order or make more of your product. You can set up inventory tracking, view your inventory, and adjust your inventory counts within Shopify.
Shopify Order Management Software (OMS)
If you want to track your Shopify inventory in real-time, you need an order management software that allows you to do that.
Our Shopify OMS integration here at Thill integrates seamlessly with Shopify.
Your basic Shopify dashboard is helpful, but no where near the data our OMS provides you.
Setting Up And Organizing Products
One of the first steps to managing your inventory in Shopify is setting up all of your products.
While assigning barcodes and naming your products are important, Shopify has a “classifications” section that will allow you to organize your products as needed.
Shopify’s inventory management system allows your products to be grouped in several different classes, such as
- By Category
- By Type
- By Season
- By Sale
While this option is extremely important for managing your inventory, it’s also important for your web development team as they can populate your products throughout the website for appropriate reasons. For example, if you want to list your new “on sale” products, it’s easy to do with these product structures.
Tracking Stock Counts
For those of you that rely on heavily on your online store, you already know how vital stock counts are to your business.
At some point, all of us have experienced it. A customer is shopping, finds something they’ve been wanting and places an order. Everything runs smooth, then the order hits the warehouse and your out-of-stock. Yeah, no good. Since you don’t have a tracking system in place, the products shows available on your website.
With Shopify, you won’t have that problem anymore, there’s a few different highlights for this specific feature.
- Track your stock counts
- Automated reminders to reorder
- Automated reminders for manufacturing items
- Updated inventory counts with each new order
With this feature, you’ll never have to worry about selling another product that is out of stock. You’ll be able to keep track and have an accurate accounting of your stock counts.
Inventory Insights
The whole point of inventory management tools is so you can learn how your inventory moves.
- Which products are in high demand?
- Which products are not selling?
- Which products sell best during the month of April?
There’s a number of inventory insights you’ll get on the Shopify platform.
Managing And Assigning Barcodes
Some ecommerce solutions struggle to add your existing barcodes to their inventory system. With Shopify, you won’t have that problem. Shopify makes it easy to add existing barcodes to your inventory management system or you can assign new ones.
Shopify also has a cool ad-on, it’s their wireless barcode scanner. This allows you to easily ring up customer orders anywhere in your store.
Managing Your Product Variations
For those of you that have multiple colors of one item or multiple sizes, inventory management can become quite complex. Colors and sizes are just 2 of many examples in variations, your business may have a LOT of variations to track.
The good news, Shopify has you covered on that front.
While some ecommerce platforms struggle with variations, Shopify does not. You have the option to create as many variations as you want. These variations can be based on anything, color, size, materials, type, and others. Even better, every variation that’s created will get an unique SKU, weight, price and inventory number.
No more problems and complications with your variations, well, as long as you’re using Shopify that is.
The Right Data To Fuel The Growth Of Your Business
Thanks to the data and analytics you get from Thill’s software, you can make real-time decisions based on your data.
Want to learn how our OMS fits with Shopify? Just give us a call at 1-920-967-9201 and talk to one of our Shopify experts.
