Inventory management is a very important part of any ecommerce business. Magento as an ecommerce platform has a very capable inventory management functionality. That one feature which doesn’t come in the out of the box and is often required by mid to enterprise level organizations is multi-warehouse/location inventory management.
Organizations who had been using a full-fledged back office system like an ERP while venturing into ecommerce often wish to maintain multiple stock values for each product in the online store. As a standard practice they mostly have multiple warehouses set across different locations, defined in their back office system. So in the ecommerce store as well they wish to have separate inventory values to be maintained for each warehouse as defined in their back office system. Magento by default allows maintaining only one stock value for each product.
We have seen merchants looking for different versions of multi warehouse/multi location stock management in Magento. Some can be catered by already available extensions available in the market, while some might require a bit of customization in Magento.
Two most common scenarios –
Scenario 1: Have one website in Magento but at the front end the customer would get to see the availability of the item per warehouse/location based on the option he selects from a dropdown. There could be even pre-configured delivery time estimates to be shown to the customer based on the warehouse selected. The customer should be able to place an order and opt to get it delivered from the preferred warehouse.
Scenario 2: Have multiple websites in Magento for different countries or regions and have different stock values for each site. So, certain organizations prefer defining multiple websites in Magento and they have warehouses defined in their back office corresponding to each of those sites. For example, a Magento instance can have two sites, one for Europe and another for America. In this case the organization might have two separate warehouses in their ERP to cater orders from those two regions. So orders paced on the European site are likely to get catered from the European warehouse. So two separate stocks needs to be maintained in the Magento, one for Europe and another for America.
Here are some popular extensions that can enable multi -location/multi warehouse inventory management in Magento:
- Multi location inventory by Aitoc:
- Multi Warehouses by Magenest:
- Inventory Extension for Magento 2 by Boost my Shop:
Version Compatibility: Community/Enterprise | 1.x series
Highlights:
Separate inventory value for each website.
Low-stock reports per website/ all websites.
Open source.
Version Compatibility: Community/Enterprise | 2.x series
Highlights:
Multi warehouse set up with – location, contacts, allowed shipping carriers and methods.
Warehouse wise product allocation.
View warehouse and its shipping shipping detail for each order from back end.
Open source.
Compatibility: Community/Enterprise |2.x series
Highlights:
Multi-warehouse definition.
3 different stock levels – Current Stock in the warehouse, quantity booked for sales orders to be dispatched, Available Quantity (current stock – quantity booked).
Associate warehouses for with Magento websites.
Open source.
Now, these extensions will enable maintaining multi warehouse/website wise stock in Magento. But most organizations requiring this feature might need the warehouse inventory figures to be fetched from the back office system. So for that as well we have a solution – APPSeCONNECT.
APPSeCONNECT can sync your product inventory values from the individual warehouses of your ERP into your Magento in real time. Along with that we can even get estimated delivery window for each product from your ERP into Magento. Whether you are into Made to stock or Made to order model we can sync a lot of business critical data into your Magento in real time from your ERP. Get in touch with us if you want to know more.
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