Shopify inventory tracking and management

Good inventory tracking and management is one of the most crucial parts of a Shopify merchant’s success. Overstocking, increased costs, delayed orders and deliveries, and customer unhappiness can all arise from ineffective inventory management. This article will show you how to track your Shopify inventory with a Mixtable spreadsheet. It will also show you how to manage your inventory across products and locations, and sync the data back to Shopify.

Shopify inventory tracking with a Mixtable spreadsheet

Tracking inventory is done extremely easy via a spreadsheet interface. You can:

• track how much inventory you have in stock for a product or variant,
• track inventory across multiple locations,
• share inventory information with others,
• and export your inventory to an Excel file.

Note: Before we show how to track Shopify inventory with a Mixtable spreadsheet, it’s important to explain how Shopify stores inventory. In Shopify, inventory quantities are related to variants, not products. This is always the case, even if you haven’t added any variants to a product as Shopify always auto-creates a variant for every product in its own database. This inventory-variant relationship is important to understand as we set up inventory tracking/updates in Mixtable.

Managing inventory from a Products - Complete Data worksheet

Here are the steps to get your inventory into your worksheets.

1. Add a Products - Complete Data worksheet if you haven’t already (here’s how to do this with Mixtable)

2. Find a column that is currently empty, and right-click on the header of the column (the header contains the column’s letter)

3. Click on the Shopify Sync Settings option

4. In the Shopify Sync Settings interface that opens, select the Inventory radio button

5. You will now see a dropdown containing the various inventory locations that you have set up in Shopify. Select the location whose inventory you want to map into the column as well as the type of inventory you want to display.

6. Click on the Save button

7. The Shopify Sync Settings interface will close, and you will see the column populate with each variant’s inventory at the selected location

8. Repeat the steps above for any other locations whose inventory you’d like to map to a column

   You can choose between the following types, however keep in mind that you can only modify information on your available inventory:

   

Setting inventory quantities from your Mixtable spreadsheet

Once you’ve loaded your existing inventory at each location in your spreadsheet, managing that inventory is as easy as 1-2-3.

1. To set the inventory for a particular product/variant, just find the relevant cell and change its value.
2. You’ll see the cell background turn light yellow, indicating that the new value hasn’t yet been synced to Shopify.
3. To get this process underway just click on the Sync sheet to Shopify button in the top-right hand corner of the screen and Mixtable will sync the inventory quantity to Shopify.

When using Mixtable for tracking and management of your Shopify store inventory you can also take advantage of using Excel formulas as long as it makes sense for your business.

Example: If you have inventory at three locations and you supply two of them from one main location you can use an Excel formula to automatically recalculate the stock you currently have at the main location.

Inventory changes sync automatically from Shopify to Mixtable

The Mixtable worksheet will also reflect any inventory changes made in your Shopify store. If you have your workbook open when the change comes in from Shopify the updated cell will be highlighted for a few seconds in a light green color.