Quick question for the CS-Cart community:
How do you manage your inventory?
We currently run 3 sites, all selling the same products with the same SKU's. All sites, while selling the same product, are marketed differently. It's hard to set up inventory tracking on CS-Cart for each individual site, because if we sell on one site, then the other 2 sites need to be updated manually.
What we are looking to do, is basically set up a barcode inventory system on a local computer, and enter each item into the system.so once an item is sold, we simply scan the item, and the inventory system automatically updates the inventory
Does anyone know of any barcode system that can do this?
It's a custom job. I've been looking into this too. Its gets complicated too if you receive bulk shipments of a certain product. For example, a single can of coke has one barcode, a six pack has another (but you still need to update the same product in the cs cart database). I think the best bet is to use proper inventory management software such as inFlow. You can import your products into it, plus it allows exports as csv. You can set it up to accept a barcode, or multiple barcodes per product. In your case, I think you would require a custom export of product qtys per site that gets imported into inFlow, that updates your overall qtys throughout. InFlow would become your parent database.
Why not just use 1 install with multiple storefronts?
If you use 1 install with multiple storefronts they can all share the same SKU and inventory? We are in the process of upgrading to Ultimate to run several different store fronts.
I think, you should check the warehouses module in this case. Since the warehouse can be specific per store-front, you will have an ability to specify different inventory for the same SKU
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What I really want is for all 4 store to share one stock level. All similar products ship from the same warehouse. This way when one store front sells an item it gets removed from all store fronts.
Another issue I have is that we sell the same products with different sku’s but keep track of the items using “our part number”
So a product may be listed as
Product Code: Widget 1s
Product Code: Widget 1b
Product Code: Widget 1r
But in a custom field we have added they are all under “Our Part Number” as 157159
So when any one of them on any of the stores gets purchased we need the stock level to drop for all of the ones that use the same “Our Part Number”.
We do this because many times our manufacturer changes the alpha on a product when they have dome some type of an upgrade so we can only sell the latest version but we don’t want to loose ranking on the old version/part numbers.
Any suggestions with this?