Question
Hi there. I have a potentially exciting opportunity, and I'd like to figure out how we can make it happen. One of my vendors has asked if we'd like to partner with them to sell off their backstock at no cost to us -- we would have it on our website, it would be in their warehouse, and when we get an order for their stuff, they would ship it out to us, and we'd ship it to the client. But, right now, the online availability is tied to what is in our official inventory in the store. Is there away around this, to show an item/size/color as available, even if it isn't officially in our POS inventory?
Thanks for your advice!
Answer
You can't enter the inventory directly in Store Manager because as you get orders and they go down to Quickbooks, they will get denied and won't get inserted. However, if you add the inventory in Quickbooks POS first, even with zero inventory, you can add them to Store Manager still and then use our "Allow Backorder" feature to tell your website to ignore the inventory levels from Quickbooks. This will allow you:
- to take the order from the consumer
- allow you to see the order in Store Manager allowing you to contact your vendor to have them ship it to you
- ship the order from Store Manager as you normally do
- these completed orders would go down to Quickbooks like usual (albeit they will show up as negative inventory in Quickbooks POS)
Some of our retailers have the vendor "drop ship" the product directly to the consumer in Step 2. Sounds like your vendor is going to ship it to you directly but this is also an option.
In summary, add products like you normally do in Quickbooks and Store Manager, and then ship them out like you typically do in Store Manager (contacting your vendor when you get one of their orders). Does that make sense?
Here's more information on how you can set this "Allow Backorder" option for the entire product or by a particular size (option) for that product:
Please let us know if you need anything else. Thank you.