Products: Inventory

Overview

You can set inventory on your items to ensure that only the amount of product is sold without overselling a certain product. You'll also be able to set the baselines for when products are at low levels of stock.  If you're using this feature, you'll be able to determine what your stock levels are for any specific product at any given time.

Requirements

The following prerequisites will be necessary to accomplish the goals of this article:

• Have access to your Hotcakes store administration
• Determine whether or not you wish to track and manage inventory

Getting Started

There are no prerequisites to continuing with this article.

Products: Inventory

You won't be able to manage inventory until you first select a product.  Find and enter the edit view for any product.  Next, choose the "Inventory" menu item from the left panel.

When you first arrive to this view for most products, you'll likely see a single row in your inventory grid, and all of the levels will be zero.

The following table describes the grid columns.

Column	Description
SKU	This is the SKU for the product.  If you have any variants listed, this value may be different, and it will be followed by the choice item combination that makes up the variant.
On Hand	This value will let you know how many of this product are currently awaiting to be sold.
Reserved	The quantity reserved is the number of products that are currently referenced in orders that have not yet been fufilled.
Available for Sale	The quantity you have to sell is equal to the total of on hand products, minus the low stock level.
Stock Out At	This is the quantity that you want to specify as representing when this product is considered to be out of stock.  For example, you may want your level here to be 3 to account for returns and breakage.  Enter any whole number.  The default is 0.
Low Stock At	The low stock quantity is when you might want to consider replenishing your inventory.  For example, when your inventory lowers to 5, you might want to re-order the product or product materials so that you can have more product on hand.  Enter any whole number.  The default is 0.
Adjustment	This setting allows you to choose how you wish to adjust the inventory for this specific inventory row.  The different adjustments are discussed below.
Quantity	The quantity you enter here should be a whole number and it will be used together with the "adjustment" field when you save the inventory view, to adjust the inventory levels accordingly.

Inventory Mode

By default, none of the products in your store use inventory, but you can choose to change this for any and all products, any time you wish.

Setting	Description
Always In Stock (Ignore Inventory)	When this setting is used, the inventory levels will not be checked or adjusted by any other part of your site.  You can set the levels if you'd like, but the product will simply be shown and sold without restriction.
When Out of Stock, Remove from Store	With this setting, the product will no longer be shown to customers when the "Stock Out At" level is reached, even if they attempt to navigate directly to the product page.  Site administrators and others with permissions to edit the store will still be able to see the product as normal.
When Out of Stock, Show but Don't Allow Purchases	When the "Stock Out At" level is reached, this setting will show the product, but customers will not be able to add the product to their cart.  An "out of stock" message will be displayed to them on the product page, and the "Add to Cart" button is removed.
When Out of Stock, Allow Back Orders	The "Stock Out At" level will trigger this setting as well.  The customer will see a"backordered" message, but they will still be able to place any order for the product.

Inventory Adjustment

You can adjust the inventory levels quickly for one or all of the inventory rows you might see in your inventory grid using the adjustment field shown below.

Setting	Description
Add	The value in the "Quantity" textbox in the same row will be added to the "Quantity On Hand" value.
Subtract	The value in the "Quantity" textbox in the same row will be subtracted from the "Quantity On Hand" value.
Set To	The value in the "Quantity" textbox in the same row will replace the value in the "Quantity On Hand" value.

Inventory Messages

When you arrive at the inventory page, and after you click the "Save Changes" button, the page will load and a message will be seen at the top of the page.  This message is based upon the combination of your currently selected inventory mode, and the "Available for Sale" quantity.

The message below will be shown when your product is above the out of stock level, or the inventory mode is set to ignore inventory.  Your product is shown and fully available for purchases in the store.

If you're using any mode besides the "ignore inventory" mode, this message will be shown once your product reaches the out of stock level you've set.  The product is not being shown to customers, and they are no longer able to purchase the product.

Inventory and Variants

In many cases, you'll only have a single row in this grid, but that changes once you enable one or more variants for the product.  In the grid below, you'll see many rows - one for each variant.  You can set the inventory levels and settings for any single variant or all variants at the same time.

The SKU column will be a bit different now.  It will display the unique SKU for each variant (if different), and the choice item combination that defines the variant.