Inventory Management

Is Shopify Plus Inventory Management Enough?

As long as your needs are simple, the Shopify Plus inventory management solution is a great tool. But what if your inventory needs aren't so straightforward?

Paula Conlon

Sep 1, 2022

Inventory management is the life blood of any successful Shopify Plus store. Having a single view of inventory allows your brand to know exactly how much you have, where it is, and what status it is in. This requires keeping all inventory and order data in sync with your warehouse and ERP.

Unfortunately, the Shopify Plus inventory management functionality can still be a bit limiting. Once you start selling through new channels, creating new products, and expanding into the international market, your inventory needs become increasingly complex. Shopify is not built to support such complexity.

Limitations of Solely Using Shopify to Manage Inventory

If you have more than one warehouse, fulfilling orders with multiple items can start eroding your margins. Since you cannot set rules for which warehouse a product can ship from, you may be forced to ship from multiple warehouses to fulfill a single order, ultimately increasing shipping costs.

Shopify Plus is not a single source of truth. When a change needs to be made to an item (e.g., price, images), someone will have to not only make the change within Shopify, but they will also have to update their other system of records (e.g., PIM). Doubling the manual input only doubles the risk for errors.

Shopify is one sales channel, but you need to be able to have a single source of truth to manage inventory across them all. If you want to branch out into wholesale, for example, you need a separate store to run a full wholesale site (which requires more money). Reserving inventory for wholesale partners from your ecommerce site is difficult to track—reserved inventory is not represented in the inventory count actuals, putting brands at risk of overselling.

Improve Shopify Plus Inventory Management With a Unified Platform

Your inventory comes from multiple locations (manufacturer, warehouse, returns) in multiple statuses (on hand, on order, committed, reserved, etc.). ChannelApe streamlines inventory, order, fulfillment, and returns management by integrating directly with Shopify Plus and acting as the single source of truth for all things inventory.

With our unified set of APIs, you can connect almost any system you need—PIM, DAM, WMS, and ERP, among others. By ingesting data from Shopify Plus along with your storefront(s), wholesale partner(s), warehouse(s), and/or supplier(s), you can achieve the following:

- Avoid overselling and keep customer satisfaction high: When you know how much you can sell, you won't accidentally overpromise customers
- Leverage accurate data to make better decisions: Discover items sitting at the warehouse, get returned goods back to sellable faster, and identify your top and worst sellers so you know what to (and what not to) buy
- Reduce manual processes: Never manually create and pull a report, stop updating product information changes more than once, and set-and-forget your unique fulfillment rules

All without having to rip-and-replace your current systems.

Inventory Management Multi-location Shopify shopify plus

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