How to Manage Brick And Mortar Stock With WooCommerce?

WooCommerce is a WordPress-based plugin. Thus, it has a user-friendly dashboard to add products and manage them. Further, WooCommerce comes with mobile support that lets you manage your brick and mortar store from anywhere. This post will walk you through the complete process of how to manage brick and mortar stock with WooCommerce.

Alone in the U.S, online retail is expected to reach $476 billion by 2024. Consumers are looking for fast and easy solutions. Therefore, most brick and mortar stores are going online with plugins like WooCommerce to manage and upsell their stock.

Being overstock/understock can lose your potential customers and increase your business expenditures. But thanks to WooCommerce Stock Manager, it is now easy to manage products and their variables.

What is Stock Management in WooCommerce?

Stock management is a vital business process that maps a stock’s journey from its production to the delivery stage. Inventory management is crucial for brick and mortar businesses as goods flow from manufacturers to their end-users.

WooCommerce has made it super easy to manage different types of products. Using a simple dashboard, brick and mortar stores can upload and manage several products on WooCommerce. Many users choose Shopify for setting up their online stores, which has a separate set of advantages. However, there are many who move from Shopify to WooCommerce for better customization options.

It allows you to control customer orders when you are understock. The ‘Allow back orders’ lets you receive the customer orders during the understock situation. There you have three options to manage your stock–

• Don’t allow customers to place an order when a product is out of stock
• Allow customers to place an order with notification that the product will be soon available
• Let customers place an order without notification

In addition, you can also set a minimum stock limit for WooCommerce to remind you about restocking. Suppose you have set a threshold value up to 2 over 20 products. In that case, when 18 products are sold, WooCommerce will send you an email notification to re-order. This way, you will never run out of stock.

Why is WooCommerce Stock Management Important for Brick And Mortar Businesses?

Inventory management is the lifeline of brick and mortar businesses. It makes stock information clear to both business owners and customers. Stock management can help to build a strong connection between customers and businesses. Besides this, WooCommerce stock management is helpful for:

• Providing the best support and delivery to your customers
• Minimizing loss due to excess inventory orders that won’t sell on time
• Managing Proper inventory to place accurate stock orders
• Improving your revenue and strengthening your bottom line

How to Manage Brick And Mortar Stock With WooCommerce?

Every brick and mortar store sells different types of products. Broadly, these products are divided into two categories:

• Simple products
• Variable products

WooCommerce allows you to create and manage both product categories separately. If you know how to choose the right WooCommerce theme that goes with the exhibition of your products, the selling becomes easy. Let’s study how to manage variable and simple products on WooCommerce.

Manage Brick And Mortar Simple Stock

Simple products or stocks are the easiest ones to manage. That is because these products don’t have any variation in color, size, etc.

Here’s how to add simple products to your WooCommerce store–

• Go to your WooCommerce dashboard > Products > Add Product.
• Name your product.
• Click on the Add Media button to insert your product images.
• Write your product description and price in the given field.
• Add product categories and tags.
• Finally, click on Publish to add the product to your WooCommerce store.

Here are the steps to manage simple products with WooCommerce–

• Go to your product list and click on the Edit button.
• Scroll down to the Product Data.
• From there, click on Inventory and jot down SKU (stock keeping unit, or say unique identifier).
• Click on the Manage Stock option.
• Select a suitable option from Allow back orders.
• State your low threshold value.
• Define whether you want a customer to purchase more than one quantity or not under the Sold individually option.
• Simply update the product.

Further, you can allow customers to place orders when stock is out of order or view the available stock present in the inventory.

Manage Brick And Mortar Variable Stock

Variable products are stark opposite to simple products. They have different variations like color, size, price, etc. Thus, you have to add different images or price ranges for each variant on your brick and mortar WooCommerce store.

Here are steps to add and manage variable products on WooCommerce–

• Go to the Product menu and click on the Add New Link. Alternatively, you can click on the +New from the dropdown menu of your menu bar.
• Under the Add new product section, write the name of your product and a brief product description stating every bifurcation like gender, age, etc.
• Click on the Add Media button to upload product images.
• After that, set up the product type in the product database and select the Variable product.
• You can add product attributes like color, size, or price range. Don’t forget to add a slider bar between them.
• Click on the Save Attributions button and click on the Variations tab.
• If you want to control your product variations, click on the Create variations from all attributes, and click Go.
• Click OK on the popup and wait for the process to complete.
• Once variations are added, click on Set product image to define which product image should come first and so on.
• Next, add your product tags and categories.
• After that, click on the Inventory Tab and manage your product like the simple products.
• Don’t forget to click on the Publish button once your work is done.

Manage Brick And Mortar Stock With WooCommerce Plugins

If you are struggling to manage your brick and mortar store inventory, you can use simple and powerful plugins to manage it. On WooCommerce, you will find several stock management plugins to save your time.

In addition, using stock management tools, you can manage sizable variable stock faster without any errors. Here are a few worthwhile WooCommerce inventory management plugins:

Veeqo

Price: Starts at £150 per month

Veeqo is a multichannel inventory management system. It can sync across all your digital stores like Amazon, eBay, Shopify, WooCommerce, and others. This software can also manage warehouse and shipping operations for large businesses. Veeqo also lets you generate sales, picking and inventory reports, and forecasts for the future.

WooCommerce Out of Stock! Manager

Price: Starts at $16

WooCommerce Out of Stock! Manager or WCOSM is one-track inventory management software. This software provides simple features to assign custom low stock values on each product and/or category. This way, you will get instant notification when a product or product category has limited stock, so you can quickly re-order. It supports the WPML WordPress multilingual plugin that allows you to easily manage stock from your WordPress dashboard.

ATUM Inventory Management

Price: Freemium.

ATUM Inventory Management is the most powerful stock manager for WooCommerce users. It is a free tool with premium addons for additional features. The ATUM has a centralized dashboard to receive a bird’s eye view of your entire stock. This tool can manage variable products with ease. You can take bulk product actions and receive PDF stock reports within a click. This is the perfect tool if you wish to automate your WooCommerce stock management process fully.

WooPOS

Price: Starts at $179 per month

WooPOS is a leading e-commerce point of sale and inventory management solution. Besides stock management, this tool is a complete customer relationship management (CRM) solution that allows you to store your customer data in the cloud. This way, you can access your customer data anytime and anywhere. It can also generate robust reports and manage multiple storefronts for you.

Parting Thoughts

Stock management is crucial for every online store today. Without proper inventory management, you can’t provide a good experience and service to your customers.

Thus, if you have an online brick and mortar store or are planning to start one, sort your inventory first. Thanks to WooCommerce, you can now easily manage multiple products. WooCommerce has a simple and intuitive interface for stock management.

Besides this, much great inventory management software is available for WooCommerce websites. You can download the stock management plugin on your website and never ever worry about overstocking or understocking.