How to Work with Inventory Quantities

This guide covers how to manage your stock counts with Order Desk and provides information about some special features, such as setting minimum and maximum quantity safety levels and skipping the inventory sync on certain items.

If you are looking for information on how to work with your inventory item details, please refer to the Working with Inventory Details guide.

Send Counts to/from Order Desk

With Integrations

Most fulfillment service and shopping cart integrations have an inventory sync feature that can be found on the integration settings page. If you want your fulfillment service to send inventory counts to Order Desk, check the integration for this setting, and if you see it, click to enable it:

If you want Order Desk to send your inventory counts from here to your shopping cart, check the shopping cart integration settings for the same feature and ensure it is enabled:

Due to the differences in different services, this is not available for all integrations. If you do not see an inventory sync setting in an integration, it isn't available.

If both are enabled, Order Desk will pull inventory numbers from your fulfillment service and send them to your shopping cart. You can opt to only have one or the other enabled if you prefer.

If you have your store set up so inventory counts are synced in from your fulfillment service and sent to your shopping cart, and you import your products from your shopping cart, this can mess up your counts. It should correct itself on the next pull from your fulfillment service that will then be pushed to your shopping cart, but please import products with caution if you are currently syncing counts to your shopping cart.

Updating Stock Counts with Spreadsheets

If your fulfillment integration doesn't have an inventory sync feature, or if you are using a third party that is not integrated with Order Desk, they can still send your inventory counts to Order Desk using a spreadsheet. This can be sent in through email, FTP or manually uploaded to Order Desk by a store admin.

For instructions on how to set this up, please see the Importing Spreadsheet Data guide.

If inventory sync is turned on for your shopping cart integration, this will work the same way as pulling inventory counts from a fulfillment integration. As your inventory numbers are updated in Order Desk, these will be pushed through to your shopping cart.

Update Stock Counts as Orders are Added

There is a setting in your store settings that, if enabled, will reduce stock counts from Order Desk as your orders are imported.

If you are syncing inventory to your shopping cart, be careful not to bypass Order Desk by updating your inventory counts directly in your shopping cart. Update inventory in Order Desk instead, if you have this setting enabled, so the numbers in Order Desk will always be accurate, even when a new order comes in. Those numbers will be synced back to your cart.

Send Counts Between Order Desk Stores

If you need to keep your inventory synced between two or more of your Order Desk stores, please see the How to Sync Inventory Between Order Desk Stores guide for more information.

Safety Levels

If you need to set some safety levels on certain products to prevent them from overselling, use the special metadata fields described here.

Adjustment Percentage

Let Order Desk tell your shopping cart a certain percentage of what stock is actually available by using adjustment_percent in your item metadata.

If you set the adjustment percent to 50% and your actual stock is 70 items, your cart will be told there are only 35 items available.

Min/Max Levels

Another option is to set a minimum or maximum number of items available in your cart, regardless of the actual stock level. To do this, add min or max to the item metadata and set your preferred min or max number.

For minimum, the number you set will be used to tell your shopping cart that you have 0 items in stock when that stock level is reached. A min of 3 means that when 3 or fewer items are in stock, Order Desk will tell your shopping cart that you are out of stock.

For maximum, the number you set will be used to tell your shopping cart the highest stock level you want displayed if your actual stock is higher. A max of 25 means any time your stock level is actually over 25, Order Desk will tell your shopping cart that you only have 25 items in stock.

Inventory Helper

If you would like to receive email notifications when stock is low in your Order Desk store, you can use the Inventory Helper integration. For more information on setting this integration up, please refer to the Inventory Helper guide.

Skip Sync

Skip Pull from Fulfillment Services

If you are syncing inventory in from any fulfillment services and there are any specific items that you do not want them to update, you can tell Order Desk to "skip the pull" for that item.

To do this, set skip_pull as item metadata and set the value to 1.

Items with skip_pull added will not pull in any inventory updates from your fulfillment service.

Skip Push to Shopping Carts

Similarly, if you are syncing inventory to any shopping carts and there are specific items that you do not want Order Desk to update, you can skip these items when inventory is pushed to your carts.

To do this, set item metadata called skip_push with a value of 1 to any inventory items to be skipped.

Items with skip_push added will not receive any inventory updates from Order Desk when the inventory in your shopping cart is updated.

Inventory Quantities for Replaced SKUs

If you are replacing SKUs before sending orders for fulfillment, this may impact your store's ability to sync inventory counts back to your shopping cart. For more information on replacing SKUs using code replace or product code match, please refer to this guide.

Code Replace

If you need to sync inventory counts for bundles back into your shopping carts, code_replace is the best option, but it will only work with these specific shopping carts and integrations:

• Miva
• Amazon Marketplace
• Bandcamp
• BigCommerce
• Bonanza
• BrightOrders
• CommerceHub
• eBay
• Ecwid
• Faire
• Finale Inventory
• Google Shopping
• Houzz
• Joor
• Inventory Planner
• Logicbroker
• Newegg
• Nexternal
• Sellbrite
• Shopify
• Square
• Squarespace
• Walmart
• Wayfair
• WooCommerce

If you don't see an integration you'd like to use code replace with listed here, feel free to reach out to our Support team for available options.

To sync inventory using code_replace, the SKU with the code_replace on it should be set to a quantity of 0 in Order Desk. The inventory quantity on the new SKU will be used to tell the shopping cart how much is in stock for the original SKU.

For code_replace bundles, set the bundle item (the one with the code_replace in it) to 0. The lowest inventory quantity from all of the items in the bundle will be sent back to the shopping cart as the amount in stock for the entire bundle.

Product Code Match

If using product code match with any fulfillment integrations, the inventory counts cannot be synced back into the shopping carts for the original SKUs.

Rules

If you create rules to replace SKUs on any items in an order, the inventory counts cannot be synced back into the shopping carts for the original SKUs.