The amount and type of products you are selling on your website depend on your physical product disposal. On your online store, WooCommerce has a feature that helps you control your physical goods and ensures you do not oversell products. It also aids you in scheduling purchase orders from wholesalers, filling backorders and creating metrics that visualize how well your business is going and in which areas sales do best. In the today’s lesson, we will show you How to Manage Inventory in your WooCommerce online shop.
Inventory Settings
First, you need to login into the admin area of your WordPress site. Then, go to WooCommerce > Settings > Products > Inventory. The Inventory drop-drow list will appear.
There are some available options you have to configure.
Manage Stock – Click the Manage Stock box to enable stock on all products. The feature will be enabled by default. If you have a mix of virtual and physical products, you can skip this option here and enable stock on individual product posts (explained in the next section)
Hold Stock (minutes) – This option determines the amount of time in which the pending orders will be preserved. When this limit is reached, WooCommerce will remove the item from the inventory. Leave blank to disable.
Notifications – Check this option to enable the notifications for low or out of stock items.
Notification Recipient – Enter the email to receive the email notifications about the ending stock of certain product. This is very useful if you have to distribute the products or if you want to automate the process.
Low Stock Threshold – Enter the number of stock that when the stock reaches this number, the notification for low stock will be sent (should be at least 1)
Out Of Stock Threshold – The amount of stock when the notification for out of inventory should be triggered (typically 0)
Out Of Stock Visibility – Check this option if you want out of stock items not to be displayed in the Catalog
Stock Display Format – From the drop-down list, select the way that stock will be displayed within the WooCommerce product page. There are 3 selections: “Always show stock”, “Only show stock when low”, “Never show stock amount”.
Once you complete all the steps to manage your inventory, please press the Save Changes button to save all the changes.
Per-Product Inventory Options
So, you’ve configured WooCommerce Product Inventory, right?
Now, we will show you the steps to manage inventory via the Product options panel on the Product page.
Step 1: Go to Products > Products.
Select one product on your product list, and then click Edit.
Step 2: Scroll down and find the Product Data section and then select the Inventory tab from the drop-down list.
Step 3: Filling in the SKU box. (A Stock-keeping unit (SKU) is a unique code for each distinct product and service that can be purchased).
Step 4: Check the Manage Stock if you want to set the inventory management for this product.
After checking, two options will appear:
- Stock quantity: enter a number for the amount of products you have on hand.
- Allow backorders: If you enable this option, that means you allow your customers to purchase out-of-stock items. You have 3 selections: “Do not allow”, “Allow, but notify customer” and “Allow”
Step 5: Check Sold individually if you only allow one of this item to be bought in a single order. This is pretty useful if you sell the items that are one-of-a-kind or limited.
Conclusion
That’s all for today. In next lesson, I will show you How to Set up Downloadable Products in WooCommerce. You can also learn more about setting Product in WooCommerce in How to Configure Display Options