Manual management brings many difficulties and inadequacies in managing multiple inventory sources of the enterprise. However, evolving technology has supported inventory management with many applications and platforms, including Magento’s Multi-Source Inventory (MSI). In this article, we want to dive into the Magento MSI to help businesses manage and coordinate their inventory better.
What is Magento MSI?
Magento 2 is an e-commerce solution deployment platform chosen by many businesses. Magento MSI is one of the remarkable features of this platform that helps businesses easily manage inventory in one or more stores. This feature is also designed to help administrators better manage inventory sources.
Benefits of Magento MSI
Magento 2 MSI is beneficial for businesses. First, this feature helps consolidate the management of physical location, source, and product. Enterprises can easily manage product information such as import-export date, origin, and related images. Furthermore, with better inventory visibility, your store can increase sales by enhancing the customer experience. Especially for orders of many items, if the customer wants to pre-order a specific item, the store can create a separate shipment from another warehouse to make the delivery faster, helping to improve customer satisfaction.
Notably, this feature of Magento also helps manage Drop Shipping easily and improves the checkout process at the store.
How to start with Magento MSI?
Manage Sources and Manage Stocks
Managing Sources is a prerequisite to starting to use Magento MSI. You must add a new source and enter the full contact information and the source’s address. This source is representative of a location where the product is stored. That place could be a warehouse, brick-and-mortar store, shipper or distribution center. After that, you must save the source configuration you set up.
Next, you need to proceed to the Stocks management step. Stocks are a reflection of the source and the store. You need to add new Stocks and fill in the information for those Stocks, including assigning the source. Note that a stock can be assigned to multiple websites, but each can only connect to 1 stock.
Manage Catalog Product Inventory
In managing the Product Inventory Catalog, you need to assign the source to the products. Once assigned, save the configuration and from here you can easily determine the quantity, stock status and modify the related information of the product.
Manage Salable Quantity
Salable inventory management helps businesses control the inventory that stores can sell through sales channels. Unlike Quantity, Salable Quantity will decrease when the customer places an order, and Quantity will not. Salable Quantity only decreases in two cases when the number of products in stock changes or when a customer places a new order.
Manage Search Selection Algorithm
The managed Search selection algorithm helps businesses determine which sources can be shipped most efficiently with the highest product margins by using the data of customers, products, addresses, stock, sources and delivery locations of the order.
Conclusion
Magento’s Multi-Source Inventory (MSI) is a great tool that greatly improves inventory management regardless of customer and warehouse location, product type or sales channels. Contact us if your business needs assistance with inventory management in stores.
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