Overcoming the Limitations of Shopify’s Native Inventory Management
While Shopify is comfortably one of the most powerful eCommerce platforms available, it does have some limitations. Shopify, for example, uses a pretty basic inventory management system in its native setup. This can cause all issues as your business expands, grows, and develops a better reputation overall. These limits can make it harder for you to scale your business over time.
What Problems Come With Shopify’s Native Inventory Management?
Some of the most common problems faced when using Shopify’s in-built inventory management tools include:
Multichannel Limitations
The first major limit of inventory management with Shopify’s inventory management suite is the lack of multichannel functions. This is very important to buy. Since you are likely to be advertising your goods on a platform other than just Shopify – many sellers are also selling on places like eBay, Amazon, and Etsy, to name but a few.
These limits can mean that you start to run into problems as your inventory stock on Shopify does not reflect the reality of your stock across all storefronts. That can become very challenging to deal with, with the lack of ability to sync data from another platform not available on Shopify – not conventionally.
Tedious Tracking
Another annoyance with Shopify’s native inventory management tools is the lack of advanced tracking. With this, you cannot follow the supply chain from start to finish with the same ease as you could with a bespoke system installed and put in place instead. While you get extra features such as barcode scanning tools, keeping things going as intended is often insufficient.
Tracking is not as easy as it should be with the native Shopify system. Sellers with a more complex supply chain system might find themselves in a tough spot about tracking times.
Restocking Stress
Restocking is one of the most important parts of running your business, and Shopify sadly has many limits when it comes to restocking. If you start to scale up your business to address demand, you will need to stay on top of restocking so that you do not run out of supply just as demand peaks.
As such, Shopify can be a letdown when it comes to the restocking process. Without a custom system, you cannot get recommendations on when – and how much – of a specific stock to order. Luckily, essential features like this can be programmed into your Shopify platform using bespoke software.
Product Restrictions
One of the main issues with Shopify’s inventory management tool is that many product types are restricted from being sold. This includes things like selling alcohol. If you are a business selling products like this regularly, migrating that stock to your Shopify account can become more than a little problematic.
This can lead to some problems with managing the inventory of these items, as you need to find workarounds that do not cause headaches. This issue can become very time-consuming to resolve and create issues like stock misalignment, stockouts, and more.
Point of Sale Confusion
One serious issue with Shopify is that the inventory management and point of sale functions do not align as you would expect. For example, even if you run out of inventory, Shopify can still allow buyers to complete the purchase despite the stock not meeting their demand.
This is mostly true for companies who sell their products physically and through their Shopify account. This, though, can lead to a lot of stressful reordering and can also cause problems when it comes to getting the products people have paid for.
Limited Rules
While Shopify does allow you to set rules on stock management and inventory levels, they are extremely basic. This means that you can find that the set-up that you have is not quite flexible enough, leading to problems with trying to set up the rules for re-ordering stock or alerting you to the fact that stock levels are low and you need to get more of a certain product, or products.
The rules can be expanded upon with bespoke software to help create a more all-around image worth your time. However, if you intend to use the native Shopify setup, you might be disappointed at the level of functionality that it can provide you with.
Limited Data
Lastly, Shopify’s native inventory management tool only provides you with data for the last 90 days. Naturally, for any business, that is not a long enough time to keep records. It means that you
can find it hard to compare the summer of the current year to the previous summer to try and spot data trends and insights.
Unless you make backups every three months, which is easy to forget in the chaos of running a business, you could lose valuable data and insights into your performance. At a minimum, you want something that allows at least 12 months of data to be reviewed at any one time to spot trends.
Overcoming Shopify’s Native Inventory Management Issues
One thing to note is that Shopify can be updated and modernised using add-ons. Custom software packages pair extremely well with Shopify, making overcoming some of the above challenges easy. While this can take some time to analyse and implement into your current inventory management plan, these custom software solutions can fill in the gaps left behind.
This can be great for ensuring your business does not become delayed as you try to accelerate its growth over time. Suppose you want to overcome the typical challenges listed above, which are inherent within the native inventory management system. In that case, you should consider investing in custom software to augment Shopify to your liking.
Need Help Improving Shopify’s Native Inventory Management?
If you have run into the above problems when using Shopify in the past, you will be all too aware of how challenging the platform can be. To help you navigate that, using custom software solutions from BlueHub could be just what you have been looking for.
Our bespoke software creation makes it easy to fill in the gaps and improve on the limitations noted above. From predictive stock levels to automated reordering, custom software can add in the features that the native Shopify inventory management tool lacks.
To discuss bespoke software solutions for your Shopify platform, contact BlueHub today.