Manage Inventory

Onport provides automatic, real-time inventory syncing across all your sales channels. Everything is always perfectly aligned across Amazon, eBay, Shopify, Magento, WooCommerce, and BigCommerce - meaning you’ll never oversell anything ever again.

Onport has support for multiple warehouses, allowing you to manage, fulfill and receive inventory across multiple locations. You can add and update warehouses from under Setup > Warehouses.

UNDERSTANDING INVENTORY LEVELS

Onport provides various inventory levels for physical and available stock. To view more information on the inventory levels for an item, click on the inventory quantity while on the inventory list or within a sale. This will open a popup showing inventory allocation, vendor feeds, recent sales, etc.

These different inventory levels are to help you really understand and keep track of your inventory. This is what each one means:

• Allocated: The total number of items reserved for orders that have not yet been shipped.
• Stocked: Total quantity of items in the warehouse, including those that are already sold but not yet shipped to customers.
• Available: This is the total number of items in the warehouse or inventory feed, excluding items allocated to sales. This is the value that you have available to allocate to other sales orders and is the value synced with your online stores. Available = Stocked - Allocated.

You can set inventory levels directly from the inventory list. If you have multiple warehouses, any adjustments will be made against your default warehouse.

Important: When making inventory adjustments from the variants list, you will be changing the stocked level and not the available level. This is to ensure you do not undersell inventory by not considering unshipped inventory.

THE INVENTORY SOURCE OF TRUTH

If you go to Integrations > e-Commerce Platform > Channel Name > Inventory and Pricing tab, you have 3 options:


Sync all inventory updates: Onport will be the inventory master, syncing inventory quantities between your store, inventory feeds and in-house warehouses - and back.

Only sync inventory feeds: Onport will be the inventory master for products connected to inventory feeds, while all other items will be managed in your store.

Don't sync inventory: Onport is not the inventory master. All inventory management will be done in your store or any connected apps.

WAREHOUSE LOCATIONS

A location represents a physical space within a warehouse where an item of stock can be held in, like a shelf or a bin.

This makes it possible to monitor how many items of a particular product are stored in a particular location at any one time. This makes picking inventory to fulfill shipments more efficient by indicating exactly where in the warehouse the picker needs to go to find the item.

Locations can be specified for a product from two places. The first is when editing a variant under the "inventory levels" section. Just click the "Add location link". You can specify the location in any format.

Secondly, warehouse locations can be set when fulfilling or receiving items on a shipment. Just click the "set location" link for the item you want to change.

 

HOW TO MANUALLY MANAGE STOCK LEVELS 

While the default setting is that your stock will be automatically synced with that of your vendors, it might be that you want to manually change it.

In this case, it is important to know that managing the stock should not be done through your store, as doing that will not be reflected on your Onport account. In other words, stock should not be managed in your Shopify store once it has been connected to Onport. Instead, you can manage your stock directly from your Onport account.

How to do this quickly:

You can make quick adjustments to your inventory levels directly by navigating to the Inventory tab and adjusting the number per product (found on the right-hand side of each product). This will give you quick access to the inventory, however, it won’t leave any record of why this was adjusted.

How to leave a record:

If you are looking to be adjusting inventory on a regular basis, and want to leave a record of doing so, you can do it from the In House-side. Just navigate to Inventory > In House > Replenishments where you make changes to vendor items, or create a new purchase.

HOW CAN I ADJUST INVENTORY FROM THE STORE?

Onport understands that every business has its own processes, and may not want to manage everything through Onport. If you prefer managing inventory levels directly from your store, you can do so. Just ensure to activate the following setting on your Onport app, so that the system recognizes that stock is managed from the store.

How to do this:

1) Navigate to Integrations and click on the store

2) Click Inventory and Pricing and choose “Don’t sync inventory” under Inventory sync

3) Save

After this setting has been turned on, you can go ahead and manage the stock levels from your store. The way to do this is by going to Products > Click on the product you want to manage > Adjust the quantity

Tip: You may want to use a third-party app, such as Zero Øut to manage your inventory feeds for you (hiding sold-out items automatically).

UPDATING INVENTORY LEVELS BY CSV

In case you are looking to update inventory levels for in-house items, or for dropshipping when there isn't a way to automatically update inventory levels, you can always do it by CSV.

To do this, you need to create an inventory adjustment file in CSV format. This file needs to contain headers for quantity and SKU.

Important: The headers must be formatted as “qty” and “sku”. Ensure that these are both written in lowercase letters. In the case you write them in any other format, the levels won’t transfer properly.

HOW TO UPLOAD THE FILE IN ONPORT:

1. Navigate to Adjustments under the Inventory tab.
2. Click on Import adjustments and select the warehouse
3. Add the adjustment reason (which will also be used for stock takes and returns)
4. Decide whether you want inventory levels to adjust by the quantity in the file. If you uncheck this setting, the levels will be set to the absolute levels listed in the file
5. Add the CSV file and click on Start Import

UPDATING INVENTORY LEVELS BY GOOGLE SHEET

Similar to the CSV method, you'll need to create a file using a Google sheet with 2 column headers: sku and qty. 
This will allow the vendors to update inventory on their side in the same Google sheet while Onport automatically fetches these updates without the need to upload files.

For more information on how the Google sheet integration works, please review this article.

VENDOR PORTAL - ALLOW YOUR VENDORS TO MANUALLY UPDATE THE STOCK

Read this section of the Vendor Portal Overview article first to make sure you have the required settings enabled in your account for the vendors to onboard themselves and to be able to edit the inventory quantities through the vendor portal.

1) Once the inventory feed is uploaded by your vendor in the vendor portal, you will also be able to see it in your Onport account under Inventory > Inventory Feeds.

2) After the products are published in your store, if you want the vendor to manage the stock in the vendor portal, you will need to do the following:

2.1) Disable the inventory feed from within Onport - this needs to be done in order to stop the inventory from updating based on the data coming from the feed. 

2.2) Go to Contacts > (choose the vendor) > Products and change the option from "Sync from a store, file or API" to "Manually update inventory levels". 

3) Now your vendor will be able to manually update inventory quantities from within the vendor portal: