Today, multichannel retail and distribution have become a necessity for brands to thrive in the eCommerce industry. Besides selling on multiple sales channels, businesses also need to face challenges associated with the multichannel sales model, including managing, tracking, and shipping inventory. Inventory management becomes more challenging and if you don’t use an effective solution to manage your inventory and fulfill orders, your business can get smashed by the pressure. In this article, we are going to discuss what makes Magento 2 the go-to multichannel inventory management solution for online retailers.
But before that, let’s take a look at the key features of ideal multichannel inventory management software and how to choose the right one.
Table of Contents
Key Features of Multichannel Inventory Management Solution
Here are the top features of a multichannel inventory management system:
- Gives a complete multichannel view
- Seamless integration with third-party eCommerce platforms like eBay, Amazon, and Walmart
- Comprehensive reports and analytics
- Cloud-based access and updates in real-time
- Warehouse management functionality
Magento is an all-in-one solution for multichannel inventory management and order fulfillment. As a leading Magento 2 development company, we are here to help you implement this functionality to help you offer a seamless user experience and grow your business revenues.
How to Choose a Multichannel Inventory Management Solution
To choose the best multichannel inventory management solution, you need to keep the following points in mind. An effective multichannel inventory software
- Maintains a complete view of your stock at every location
- Provides real-time stock and sales updates for each channel
- Generates reports to facilitate fact-based and informed decision making
These are the important traits that you should look for when investing in an inventory management solution. Magento 2 is all-inclusive multichannel inventory management software that provides a modern approach and efficient inventory management for multichannel sellers.
Magento has introduced the MSI (Multi-Source Inventory) feature in version 2.3. This feature helps in effective management of inventory using Magento 2. MSI allows the sellers to show their multiple inventory sources of a product in the Magento 2 platform without integrating or using any third-party extensions. For each product, the sellers can list multiple inventory sources in Magento and track the stock efficiently.
Magento Catalog Inventory – A Single Warehouse System
Before the introduction of MSI, Magento offered a single warehouse system known as catalog inventory. So, the sellers can reflect many inventory sources they are having as a single source.
For example, if a seller has 100 stocks in warehouse 1 and 200 stocks in warehouse 2 for a product. In Magento, the seller can show the stock of that product as 300. However, the seller cannot reflect the inventory as per an individual warehouse.
The catalog inventory allows sellers to reflect the product inventory as a part of the single source and sell products to multiple channels from that centralized source only.
Importance of a Multichannel Inventory Management Solution
Catalog inventory management is suitable if you are a single-source seller. But what if you are a multi-source seller and want to show the multi-source of your inventory? Or, if you’re planning to scale up the sources or warehouses?
The sellers cannot define and handle multichannel inventory sources in Magento. Thus, catalog inventory restricts the multi-channel sellers to define and track each source inventory separately.
However, the Multi-Source Inventory (MSI) feature allows sellers to manage multiple sources simultaneously and scale up with growing business requirements.
In Magento 2, the multi-source sellers can list many sources according to the requirement. The sources could be your physical stores, warehouses, storage places, etc. While setting up the sources for a product, the multi-source sellers can define the information about the source and the inventory available.
Applications that Benefitted from Magento 2 Multi-Source Inventory Project
- Marketplaces
A marketplace allows multiple sellers to list their products. However, in the marketplace, when many sellers sell the same product, it becomes challenging to manage the inventory of that particular product sold by multiple sellers.
If you invest in Magento eCommerce development, you can easily address this problem. How? Let’s understand this by an example.
Imagine there are three sellers, each having separate sources (S1, S2, and S3) for one product (P1) with different inventories, say S1 is having an inventory of 50, S2 is having 100, and S3 has 150.
Now with the Multi-Source Inventory in Magento 2, the inventory of these three sources will be managed and represented individually. This makes it easier to manage the P1 inventory of each seller separately.
- Dropship/Multi-Source Sellers
To scale up their business, sellers need to manage multiple inventory sources in various geographical locations. Moreover, it is a more expensive and time-consuming task to deliver products from a single warehouse system.
But what if you need to fulfill an order for Bangalore and you have a single warehouse in Delhi? Now think of the delivery time and cost you would need to invest. It would turn out to be very expensive right?
However, managing multiple inventory sources in Magento was not possible before the launch of the MSI feature. Therefore, to overcome these hurdles and facilitate smooth logistics, Magento offered the MSI feature that allows multichannel sellers to manage their multi-warehouse inventory efficiently.
So, if you’re a multi-source seller, you can enjoy this functionality by investing in Magento eCommerce development solutions.
- Point of Sale
Point of Sale (POS) for retailers has transformed dramatically over time and is gaining a lot of popularity. It’s because POS enables online retailers to sell online and in-store for a smooth selling experience.
The MSI concept in Magento allows sellers to manage the separate inventory for their physical and online stores for their products.
You can even hire Magento 2 developers to build a tailored POS system with split inventory management functionality that can help you divide the product inventory between an online store and a POS outlet. The POS system can not only support a single POS outlet but multiple POS outlets with a split inventory.
- Multi-channel Selling
If you want to showcase your product range to a larger customer base, you’re likely to integrate your existing online store to some renowned sales channels like Amazon, Flipkart, eBay, or Etsy.
However, maintaining different sources for each channel is not available in Magento. So, you can track the inventory for each sales channel separately.
For instance, if you’re having multichannel selling say Amazon with your Magento store. Before the introduction of the MSI feature, you had only single-source inventory management for multiple channels. But now, the MSI allows sellers to maintain their multichannel inventory for their sell channels separately.
Conclusion
If you’re an online retailer selling products across multiple channels, using an effective multichannel inventory management solution should be your top priority. Equipped with the right products in stock at the right time can help you exceed your sales goals.
Luckily, with Magento 2, you can manage everything from product orders to inventory to shipping and returns in a single system. Whether you’re selling products in one physical store and online or across several online marketplaces, Magento 2 can help you manage and scale your eCommerce business effectively.
If you face any issue while setting multichannel inventory management in Magento 2, you can hire Magento 2 developers from us to resolve the issue in no time.
FAQs
Q.1 What is multichannel inventory management?
Ans. Multichannel inventory management allows an organization to account for and track inventory stored at multiple geographical locations and sold across multiple sales channels like retail stores, online marketplaces, and wholesale.
Q.2. How does Magento 2 help in multichannel inventory management?
Ans. Magento 2 is all-encompassing multichannel inventory management software that allows you to:
- Streamline multichannel selling
- Maintain accurate inventory
- Improve stock visibility using barcode
- Save audit time by the stock movement
- Confidently manage procurements
- Receive real-time inventory insights
- Set flexible user access
- Leverage the latest Magento technology features
- Manage multiple warehouses easily
- Sync multichannel and multi-location inventory
Have More Questions? Feel Free to Ask Our Magento 2 Experts.
