Supplier Inventory Management

Do you need to build and fulfill a store without having your own in-house stock of the products you sell? Are inaccurate inventory values and products that abruptly become unavailable getting in your way? Say hello to Supplier Inventory Management, OMG's refreshed solution for managing high-confidence inventory without the uncertainty of inaccurate reporting on inventory figures from the supplier, and with all the customization and automation you'll need to make inventory numbers work for you.

Inventory and Supplier Badges

The Supplier Inventory interface can be accessed by going to a verified product on your store that has the Inventory badges and clicking that product. Note that not all products have Supplier Inventory management options, just the ones for which we receive updated feeds from the manufacturers, so if a product does not have the new Inventory badges when searched in the product list, it will not have access to Supplier Inventory.  The new badges will indicate if the product has one or several verified suppliers as well as know if any of the supplier(s) also offer inventory information for that product.

Shipping Warning

If weight is missing from a product, it will now be indicated by a yellow exclamation point.  

Set Thresholds and Select Product Variants

Once you're in the Inventory tab, you can select which product variants (size/color combinations) you want to offer on your store. Before you do this, though, you may want to specify your low- and mid-inventory threshold for the product in question by clicking the "Edit" button to the right of the low- and mid-inventory icons.

You can filter the displayed figures using the "Supplier" dropdown to display only inventory numbers that come from a single designated supplier.

Once you've pulled up the threshold window, you will be prompted to enter a low- and/or mid-inventory threshold value. This will highlight the product variants in the grid below to show you which product variants fall under which thresholds.

Alternatively, you may want to set account-level inventory thresholds so all stores using the same products can use the same rules for tracking inventory. To do this, you'll need to go to Manage > Account Inventory Tracker, where you can then use the "Set Thresholds" button on the right to set inventory thresholds for individual suppliers. These can also be adjusted to the preferences of specified sales reps on the left.

Once your thresholds are set, you can take a look at the product variant grid and check the boxes for the variants you want to offer (or uncheck the boxes for variants you do not want to offer if the available stock of those variants is too low). For example, in the image below, you may not want to include the top two variants since so many sizes are well below your low-inventory threshold. In this case, you would uncheck the box next to the color option on the left-hand side.

By default, any products that are checked, but which also fall under your low-inventory threshold (the red boxes) will not be available to be added to cart on your store. However, it may be the case that you would prefer to continue selling the product, even if it falls below your low-inventory threshold. In that case, you can unselect the check mark next to the "Make product variant unavailable if low-level threshold is met" toggle, which will be defaulted on.

Note: If you have a size or color option enabled via the Sizes & Options tab, which does not have available inventory or available data in the Inventory tab, those sizes and/or colors will not be available to add to the shopping cart on the storefront, even though the option is enabled in Sizes & Options.

A client may have a Size and/or Color option enabled under Sizes & Options, that does NOT have available inventory. (i.e. 18500 is offered by both Alphabroder and S&S; while S&S supports X-Small, Alphabroder does NOT - if Alphabroder is the selected supplier, X-Small won’t be selectable on the storefront even if it’s enabled)

Once you've selected the product variants to be available on your store, your changes should be automatically saved on this tab!

FAQ

How often are numbers updated?

Inventory figures are updated hourly - to see when your product's inventory values were most recently updated, you can view the timestamp at the top of the tab:

Will I receive an email notification when inventory levels hit their mid- or low-inventory thresholds?

At the moment, inventory thresholds are not connected to email notifications. However, the exclusion of low-inventory product variants has been automated so as to remove the need to log in and manually deactivate low-inventory variants.

Can I apply inventory thresholds to custom products or dealer products that I've created?

Since inventory figures are based on product detail feeds that come directly from the manufacturers, these figures cannot be applied to custom or dealer products. However, if you need to control the inventory of custom products on your store, check out our Help Center article that covers Product Quantity Limits!

Why can't I see inventory levels for Size options?

Inventory figures are based on the product details that come directly from the manufacturers. As such, the Size labels (Men's Small, Men's Medium, Men's Large, etc, etc) MUST match in your Size settings. Otherwise, if you (for example) have "Unisex Small", but the manufacturer uses "Men's Small", you may run into issues with inventory levels not appearing and/or Sizes not being selectable on the storefront when ordering the item.