Warehouses

Here’s all you need to know about warehouses on Stock2Shop.

In the below documentation we will be covering:

Warehouses and Stock2Shop

Stock2Shop can represent the relationship between products and warehouses. This relationship enables you to determine which warehouse (or combination of warehouses) controls the stock quantity that is reflected on each of your online sales channels.

It is important to note that your ERP / accounting system may not have a multi-warehouse function.

Calculating stock availability

Stock2Shop calculates stock availability as “stock on hand” less “stock on sales order”. As orders are raised into your ERP / accounting system, the stock availability is adjusted, and these changes are distributed to your sales channel(s). Stock2Shop can also add a stock buffer to limit the potential of overselling in the event of stock discrepancies in the warehouse.

Single-warehouse

If you have a single (main) warehouse on your ERP / accounting system that is managing your stock, this will be set as the default warehouse. All sales channels linked to your Stock2Shop console will receive quantity updates from this single warehouse.

Multi-warehouse

If your stock is segmented across multiple warehouses on your ERP / accounting system, Stock2Shop will bring in the stock quantities for all warehouses, with one set as the default. Each product variant will therefore have a list of warehouses on the Stock2Shop console.

Stock2Shop can then handle the available stock quantity in various forms to meet your business requirement. Here are a few ways to display stock quantities using the multiple warehouse concept:

  • Sum of all warehouses displayed as one consolidated stock quantity.
  • Display the stock quantity per warehouse as separate stock quantities.
  • Set a specific warehouse per sales channel, e.g. your online store only displays stock available in your Cape Town warehouse.
  • If you are using the Stock2Shop B2B Trade Store, you can assign a specific warehouse to a customer.

When selling out of multiple warehouses, it is important to keep your logistics and fulfillment cost structure in mind. If you’ve set up your shipping rules without taking warehouse geography into consideration, you may experience higher delivery costs than anticipated.

Outsourced warehouse and fulfillment

If you have outsourced your warehousing management to a third party logistics service (or 3PL) to handle the receiving, picking, packing and delivery of your physical goods, Stock2Shop will ensure that:

  • stock availability updates are sent from your 3PL to your online sales channels
  • online orders trigger automatic fulfillment notifications to your 3PL