Does your online store have only inventoried items? What about items you place with your vendor one at a time or in bulk? How about a mix of both?
Great news, Liftoff can handle it ALL!
Many of our client's needs fall into one of those three categories. Below, you’ll learn about how to set up inventoried/pick ‘n pack products as well as touching on the differences between using Liftoff to manage your inventory or your own ERP system to manage it.
Setting up inventoried products
So, you’ve got this awesome client that has pre-ordered plenty of stock that you are keeping in a warehouse. You want to create an online store for the ease of allowing your client to place their orders for release at their convenience - while ultimately reducing your inbound call volume. But how do you set it up?
First, you’ll want to create a vendor profile for your warehouse(s). Next, you’ll begin adding your products. During product creation you’ll see an option that says “Track inventory for this product” and you’ll want to click that box. Once you’ve said this item will be tracked, you have an opportunity to provide just a little more information. On-Hand Quantity - This is how much physical stock you’ll be starting with. “But...but...my product has variants! How do I enter the quantity for each one?” No worries...we’ve got you covered. That’s handled in another step. For now, just provide a general number. Par Level - This is your “re-order” number. The number you provide here is what tells Liftoff to send you a “low inventory” notice. Don’t care to be notified? You can leave it at 0.
Stock Level Display and Out-of-Stock Orders are pretty self explanatory. Do you want to let your customers know how much stock is in your warehouse? Are you going to allow them to backorder products? Totally within your control.
Got that part figured out? Set up the rest of the product details? Great! Now let’s talk about how you MANAGE the inventory!
Managing inventoried products
When all of your products are set up, it might be time to adjust some inventory numbers. Maybe you added in some random numbers during set-up or maybe you need to provide the true inventory for each variant of a product. Either way, it’s handled in the same place.
Products → Inventory.
Mind. Blown.
Okay...it’s not really that exciting. Or perhaps it is?
Navigating to Products → Inventory will display a list of all the SKUs for products that you ticked the “Track inventory for this product” on. Along with those SKUs are the Vendor or Warehouse location name and 3 number values.
The On-Hand refers to physical stock. If you created variants for your products (such as shirt colors or sizes), you can control how many of each size/color/whatever you have.
The Available column refers to how much you’re displaying to your customers. It’s the amount of physical stock you have MINUS any orders placed, but not yet shipped. If you plan on using Liftoff for managing your inventory all the time (great choice, by the way), then you’ll really appreciate this for a nice overview. (Note: If you are allowing backordering, your available inventory might display a negative number if stock beyond what you physically have is ordered.)
“But...what about if I use my own ERP system for my inventory?” Again, no problems. If you’ve already set up integration with your ERP system, you’ll just want to navigate over to ECommerce → Shipping → Settings tab and check the “Flag shipments as Auto-Fullfilled at order submission”. The only difference you’ll really notice? Your available and on-hand will always match.
Hope that helps you out a bit. Thanks for reading!As always, the account management team is always available to help answer your questions. Our documentation is available 24/7 at https://docs.liftoff.shop and you can submit a support ticket at any time by going to https://support.liftoff.shop.