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Allocated Inventory in Magento

Question

Magento inventory is not taking into account open orders we have of an item. For the SKU SA0077 gold, it says we have 17 in stock and it is enabled, however, we have 25 open orders with that item and it didn't automatically change to out of stock. In the past, it used to take open orders into account. We manually changed it to out of stock now, but we over sold this item and are going to have problem with customers. Why did this happen?

 

Answer

I have some good news and bad news for you.

  • BAD NEWS - This is how Magento works and there's nothing in Magento that takes into account the orders that are sitting there to be processed. It won't update the inventory until another change is received from your POS system.
  • GOOD NEWS - We have been doing this for years on other platforms. In other systems, it is called "Allocated," and it keeps track of all inventory that's currently sitting waiting to be shipped. For example, if a product, say a T-Shirt in size Small, has inventory of 5 and 3 orders have been placed for this item but not shipped, then the "real inventory" online would be 2, allowing only two more people to buy this same T-Shirt in size Small. We've been working to figure out how to do this Allocation in Magento to make it smarter. Over the past year, they've put some things in place to finally make this a reality. I won't bug you with the details, but in a nutshell our Middleware will keep track of this for you and update Magento. Or to say it another way, our Integrator will do this for you automatically!

We plan on rolling out this feature to all Magento clients in the next couple of weeks, and you'll automatically get it as soon as it becomes available.

Thank you and please let us know if you have any more questions.