Any eCommerce store selling physical goods will have to deal with some inventory management. That is why you need a quality WooCommerce inventory management plugin. While WooCommerce comes with lots of features and options by default, inventory management typically requires some extra muscle.
The good news is that there are many great tools and plugins that you can use with WooCommerce for managing your inventory. Inventory management usually is not much trouble if you are just starting out your WooCommerce store.
You have just a few products, you know where you are getting them from, and you know who is buying. But as your store grows, it all becomes complex. The demand for your products increases and you maybe even start to have more than one supplier.
This is the point when you need the help of an efficient inventory management tool that will help you keep everything organized.
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What Are Benefits of Using WooCommerce Inventory Management Plugin?
Ask yourself would you carry out the same procedure if you need to add 200 products to your store?
If you want to change prices of each or even a few, would you do that individually? Would you go to each product and tweak changes as and when you wish? Are you ready to spend so much of your productive time and resources in this cumbersome tasks?
These are what the hardships and irritation you would face while dealing with WooCommerce inventory/bulk stock management daily. WooCommerce bulk stock management is too complicated.
You need to visit all the pages and settings individually to make changes every now and then. Be it creating WooCommerce product variations or setting prices. Every time you need to visit all the dashboards and settings for each product to tweak changes.
Other difficulties include no provision for multiple warehouse inventory management, inventory batch tracking and control, editing WooCommerce inventory reports, etc.
Luckily, WooCommerce offers excellent flexibility to incorporate features that are not available out of the box with it. You can find some great plugins or extensions for WooCommerce inventory management.
Here are some aspects where using quality stock and inventory plugin for your online store can be a line between failure and success.
Multiple sales channels
There is a possibility that in addition to your WooCommerce store, you are also managing a physical store. It is good to have sales and revenue coming in from multiple channels. But how do manage the logistical challenges effectively?
The sales reports from your WooCommerce store is readily available, but the one from the physical store is not always easily updated.
Supply chain
It is not an easy task to accurately predict the demand for your products. Sales of specific products can be bad at times while sometimes they start selling like crazy.
Updating your inventory is a tricky task that needs to go according to the demand of products. You cant let yourself stocking large quantities of a slow-moving product and running low on a fast-moving one.
Being prepared all the time does a great deal of mental peace and business success.
Automation
Implementing a new plan is easy when you have all the necessary details available. Inventory management tools offer the scope of automation in everything from stock updates to marketing.
All participants in your supply chain management need to be coordinated so you can take right decisions. You can select as many items you want to update them at once. Immediately change prices, stock status, description, variation prices, weight or groups for products. You can also change status and shipping-related details for orders.
Real-time updates
When you get notifications about your store in real time, you can always be prepared to take action. Timely actions are essential to continue the smooth workflow of your WooCommerce store.
There are often times when a timely update would save an out of stock situation or delays in delivery.
What Are Best Inventory Management Plugins for WooCoomerce?
Here are some worth plugins and tools for WooCommerce inventory management.
#1. TradeGecko
TradeGecko (now QuickBooks Commerce $39/month) is one of the most popular Woocommerce order management tools that help you deal with the rising demands of a growing business. TradeGecko automates stock updates, stock adjustments and purchase orders for your store.
Its inventory software syncs your sales with multiple aspects of your store such as stock level, invoice, and delivery. The detailed reporting and analytics tools provide insights into your customer base and profits.
TradeGecko can be integrated with WooCommerce. You can even integrate more than one WooCommerce store into a co-ordinated inventory system.
It helps you sell in multiple channels at the same time and also helps with routine tasks such as creating purchase orders and integrating procurement. TradeGecko provides you valuable insights to create subscription product kits or grouped products.
Cloud-based accounting systems like Xero and Quickbooks are integrated with TradeGecko online to make your accounting needs easier to manage.
TradeGecko has a free mobile app that you can use to create and manage orders, along with monitoring your inventory. When you integrate TradeGecko with your WooCommerce store, it will take care of everything.
Once a customer places an order on your store, TradeGecko creates a sales order and generates an invoice for it. It ensures the order is paid for and shipped to the customer and updates that on the system to adjust the stock level accordingly.
It helps you sync multiple sales channels. You may be selling from your WooCommerce store, a wholesale unit and on a third-party marketplace. TradeGecko will help you capture data from all these channels so that you can control them from one place.
It provides more accuracy in a time-efficient manner. By avoiding human errors, it gives more reliability to your business. You can integrate TradeGecko on your WooCommerce store for a free trial period of 14 days.
After that, you can opt for a plan that suits your business model. There are different plans starting from $39 per month.
#2. WooCommerce Stock Manager
WooCommerce stock manager is a free plugin available in the WordPress plugin directory. It helps you manage stock for simple and variable products. You can manage stock, stock status, back orders, regular price, sale price and weight for each product and variation.
The color-coded user interface gives you a clear idea about stock status, and you can promptly take action on any critical status. You can filter products by various criteria such as product type, category, stock status, etc.
The plugin also allows you to export all data from your store into a CSV file. You can edit the CSV file according to your requirements and then import it back to your store.
Once you install the plugin, you can find a section for this plugin on the WordPress admin panel ‘WooCommerce Stock Manager.’ The plugin integrates with your available stock data and displays the detailed information on your current stock.
#3. ATUM Inventory Management
ATUM is an advanced stock management plugin for WooCommerce. The free version gives you complete control of all your products from one page.
Using advanced software like ATUM for WooCommerce, business owners can keep track of every item they have in stock. Correct management allows for higher profitability, more accurate online inventory listings, and better overall business.
ATUM is more than just an inventory management plugin. Users can create purchase orders, setup locations, and suppliers.
Some of the features include:
- Inventory logs allow you to increase or reduce WooCommerce stock
- Product Locations feature lets you create several storage locations per item
- Create custom storage places within a location
- Add new suppliers and save their data
- Set default and assign users or locations to individual suppliers
- Pair products with suppliers
- Set different suppliers for each variation
- Create purchase orders for your sellable WooCommerce inventory
- Add products to stock when you receive them at storage locations
- WPML compatibility
- Lets users see, edit and update all WooCommerce products quickly and efficiently
- Change, edit or update the inventory of every WooCommerce product in your database
- Customise the visual appearance of Stock Central with the ability to add or remove any columns according to your business needs
- Advanced search with an auto-fill feature
- Record any inventory movements in your business
- Export your full inventory into PDF or CSV
Core plugin is free. They intend to charge only add-ons which are optional.
#4. Orderhive
Orderhive ($50/month) is an inventory management system with various inbuilt features to track orders across multiple channels, manage sales and purchase orders, shipping, and inventory control.
It helps you fine-tune your stock management process, create inventory catalog using barcode readers, avoid duplicate SKUs and configure product bundles.
With Orderhive you can avoid stockouts, automatically update inventory across channels and warehouse, ascertain reorder point, and reduce the overall costs of inventory. Orderhive’s order management system automates your entire order handling and fulfillment workflow.
Orderhive syncs your order and inventory details across multiple channels and keeps your stock updated. You can also show desired stock numbers to any channel of your choice.
Orderhive also allows partial replenishment, receiving inventory into a selected warehouse, manage consignments, track expenses and create a hassle-free workflow.
Its warehouse management features allow you to manage multiple warehouses with flexible stock policies, stock transfer and full integration with your accounting software.
You can connect with shipping companies like USPS, UPS, FedEx, and DHL to ship your orders. Orderhive combines your inventory and shipping management into one simple package tracking system, with stock levels updated automatically.
You can calculate shipping rates based on essential parameters like weight and dimensions, and source of your shipments. For any order, you can choose to track the package by order number and get a real-time order status updates.
This is great if you wish to keep your customers in the loop with their order status. With your inventory at one place, you can track performance for each of your products from anywhere, at any time.
Orderhive can easily be integrated with WooCommerce. It will eliminate the hassle of manual entries and provide productive inventory and order management solution.
WooCommerce integration makes possible price auto-updates and stock changes to your store whenever a change is made in Orderhive. Any update made to order status in Orderhive will automatically get revised in your WooCommerce store.
#5. Veeqo
Veeqo ($200/month) includes everything an online retailer needs to run a successful business. Packed with a range of features for commerce retailers who want to streamline their business, Veeqo helps businesses become more efficient with the ability to manage everything from one platform.
By handling multiple inventories, Veeqo makes it easy to open up new sales channels to expand your business. You can push your products up to Amazon and eBay at the click of a button, and increase sales instantly.
By helping to streamline warehouse processes, you can pick, pack and ship orders by using the Veeqo scanner or the mobile app.
Veeqo allows retailers to sync WooCommerce inventory, manage orders from multiple channels and ship to anywhere – all within a single platform.
By keeping inventory accurate across every WooCommerce store, sales channel and marketplace in real time, Veeqo ensures you never oversell stock again.
You can automatically sync customer orders from your WooCommerce site(s), physical stores and online marketplaces into one centralised platform, saving you valuable time and making sure you never miss an order again.
By integrating with a range of world leading logistic providers, you can manage your entire WooCommerce shipping process directly in the system.
Features include:
- Inventory management – sync all inventory across every store and marketplace
- Automatic stock rules – control exactly how much stock shows for each of your stores
- Kits and bundles – easily combine products and keep stock balanced
- Advanced shipping rules – Veeqo works out which orders should be shipped based on weight, size and quantity
- Discounted shipping rates – get discounted shipping rates and instant approval for DHL and DX accounts
- Bulk printing – print up to 100 labels in a single click
- Warehouse management – pick, pack and ship inventory with speed with the Veeqo scanner
- Reporting – gain valuable insights to your business with advanced reporting and a dashboard overview
- Product management – list to marketplaces, control prices and manage intricate details
- Invoice customisation – customise your order invoices and paperwork for different brands and sales channels
- POS integration – connect online and offline stores in one place
#5. Katana for WooCommerce
Katana ($79/month) is one of the most popular choices for manufacturing and inventory management among scaling businesses.
Automate your workflows with Katana’s visual interface and smart auto-booking engine, which allow you to prioritize orders and see the availability of raw materials & finished goods in real-time.
With Katana, you can easily create bills of materials for your products and their variants, gain multichannel inventory visibility and floor-level control.
It integrates seamlessly with WooCommerce, as well as with other e-commerce platforms, or accounting software like QuickBooks.
You can connect one or several online stores to your Katana account and manage your entire business operations from a single point of truth.
Here are some of its key features:
- Finished Goods & Raw Material Availability
- Bill of Materials
- Priority-Based Production Planning
- Multichannel Support
- Manufacturing Floor-Level Control
- Manufacturing Cost Calculations
It’s a simple, yet powerful solution for any growing manufacturing business.
WooCommerce Inventory Management Final Words
Inventory management is any system that allows you to track current item inventories. That includes sales, deliveries, new products added to your stock and many more.
An inventory management system allows you to get an idea of the value as well as the specific number of the items that you have in stock. The right method of managing your inventory is useful for tax purposes, accounting, and business insights.
Managing your inventory is a significant task that can offer a lot of hassles to WooCommerce store owners. It becomes challenging when you have multiple sales and channels.
It is essential to integrate and coordinate everything in one place so that it is easier to manage store operations. Other than mentioned ones, you can try Ecomdash and Stichlabs for inventory management in WooCommerce.
The solutions mentioned in this article should help you streamline your inventory. If you have any better solution or plugin to recommend, don’t hesitate to leave a comment.
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Am surprised to not see Zoho Inventory among the list, they have millions of users worldwide and a solid WooCommerce plugin to handle everything:
https://roadmapstudios.com/product/woocommerce-zoho-inventory/
Nice article Kasa.
Adding Smart Manager to this list would make it even more useful for the readers. It is one of the most popular WooCommerce inventory management plugins.
https://www.storeapps.org/product/smart-manager/
19K+ users, 8 years of track record, 100+ 5 star reviews itself speaks about its popularity.
Some top benefits of Smart Manager:
Bulk edit – Users can update 1000s of products, variations, orders. Coupons, any WordPress custom post type in seconds.
Inline edit – Manage everything from a single screen, make changes directly and save.
Advanced search – Find the desired item from thousands in a flash.
CSV Export – Filter data based on date, search, columns and export for future reference.
There’s also a free version of Smart Manager available on WordPress – https://wordpress.org/plugins/smart-manager-for-wp-e-commerce/
The only advanced option I need is the ability to track bundles/Kits. IE. When I sell this kit, subtrack 1 each of x,y & z.
Hi Dave,
Did you find a plug-in to handle the tracking of your Kits?
I am looking for a plug-in to do as you explained.
Hi Kasa, Hope you are doing great. This is Raji from team ELEX.
Recently I came across this article about inventory management and I strongly feel our Bulk Edit plugin should be part of this list.
Let me make this as an opportunity to brief you about the product.
The basic version of the Plugin is available on our website https://elextensions.com/basic-free-version/ also we have around 100 paid customers and 1000+ free downloads so far.
The plugin is revamped recently by adding a list of new features like
1. Simple filtering and use of Regular expression (regex) patterns
2. Bulk editing Product attributes and Product Categories
3. UNDO the last operation
4. Tested for mass editing 10,000+ products
We have a live demo site to go through the product -> https://bulkeditproductsdemo.elextensions.com/
5. Schedule bulk edit using cron jobs and revert back the values after few days as configured.
We are really keen on getting our plugin recognized on Kasareviews.
Looking forward to hearing you back.
Hi Raji,
I have received your email and will respond.
This is a great and informative post. Exactly tools that I have been looking for my online WooCommerce store.
Glad you liked the post Oliver. If you have any questions feel free to ask.