You can track the real-time inventory on hand for your individual variants. When an item is sold, the quantity is automatically decreased by one. By default, when the inventory is empty, the variant is no longer available for sale unless you configured the inventory behavior to allow backorder. You can also restrict the minimum and maximum quantities that can be purchased by your customer per order.

Online inventory

The online inventory keeps track of the product quantity at hand for online e-commerce transactions. All online transactions will deduct towards the online inventory. Customers can also view the available inventory, if enabled.

For online sales, you can associate the product variant to a warehouse if this product is shipped from a different location than your business address. After checkout, the variant's inventory will automatically be reduced. You must first enable the Warehouse feature under Configuration > General to use warehouses. Please see Warehouses for more information. 

If the same product is available from different warehouses, you need to setup one variant for each warehouse so that the inventory is correctly tracked back to that warehouse. Rather than letting the user decide the variant to buy, you may want to configure the variant availability rule to show a particular variant from a certain warehouse depending on the user location. For example, you may want to use the Availability rule to detect if the user is visiting your site from California and present only the variant that is stored in your West coast warehouse, and do the reverse action for a user located in the East coast. Depending on the use case, you may need to employ 3rd party detection software like MaxMind GeoIP lookup to cookify the user visiting your site so that your Availability rule can correctly determine the precise location of the user.

In-store inventory

If you operate a physical store, you may want to keep track of the in-store inventory. Even if you sell online, it's a good idea to reserve the online inventory separate from your in-store inventory. This ensures that customers who bought online are not disappointed to find out that the product is unavailable because the in-store sales depleted the inventory.

To enter the inventory by store, you must first define your warehouses and mark them as Open to public. All offline transactions (e.g. using the POS feature) will deduct towards the in-store inventory.

From the Inventory section, simply click on the Edit in-store inventory link to enter the inventory for each of your public warehouse stores.

For customers browsing the product online, if enabled, they can view the available in-store inventory for their preferred store. See Location for more information.

Min/Max inventory

The Min and Max inventory fields are used to help you keep track of what should be the minimal and maximal quantities to keep in the warehouse. You can run reports to find out which products are running low and how many product is needed to re-stock.