When selling physical products, it makes sense that every product in the warehouse is related to inventory or stock management. Configuring and managing stock is a day-to-day job. A basic inventory setup in Magento 2 is straightforward and comparable to Magento 1. With growth, a product inventory management (PIM) system will be needed.
To step through this recipe, you will use a Droplet created in Chapter 2, Magento 2 System Tools at DigitalOcean https://www.digitalocean.com/. We will be using an NGINX, PHP-FPM, Composer-based setup including sample data. No other prerequisites are required.
For the purpose of this recipe, let's assume that we need to configure an inventory for a Magento 2 setup. The following steps will guide you through this.
- First, log in to the backend of Magento and go to Stores | Configuration | Catalog | Inventory. You will see two menu options: Stock Options and Product Stock Options.
In Stock Options you can configure the following:
All options are self-explanatory. One of the more interesting options is Display Out of Stock Products. This can be used to show the product even when it is currently not available. Some websites have a limited stock amount; by using this, the product is not always removed from the web, which is bad for search engine optimization (SEO).
- In Product Stock Options you can configure the following. All options are self-explanatory. Interesting options here are Out-of-Stock Threshold, Minimum Qty Allowed in Shopping Cart and Automatically Return Credit Memo Item to Stock.
The Out-of-Stock Threshold is set as Global, which means that it is related to all the products. Minimum Qty Allowed in Shopping Cart is related to the Customer Groups we created in the Managing customer groups recipe. Configuring the correct Minimum Qty amount helps to set the default before the discount rule applies. Automatically Return Credit Memo Item to Stock is helpful in managing credit orders. After creating a credit order, all items are updated in the current stock:
- After configuring all elements, click Save Config and update your cache.
- Now go to Products | Catalog and click edit on the Joust Duffle Bag product. On the product page we have two options to change the current stock. The first option is Quantity in the Product Detail tab in Basic Settings. This option is straightforward. The second, more detailed option is in the Advanced Settings tab called Advanced Inventory. These options here only relate to this product. Depending on the configuration, you are able to override the Config Setting of the system.
In Advanced Inventory you can configure the following. All options are self-explanatory. Interesting options are Qty Uses Decimals and Allow Multiple Boxes for Shipping.
The Qty Uses Decimals setting determines whether decimals will be used in the quantity field for the product (for example, 3.5 yards) or not.
The Allow Multiple Boxes for Shipping setting determines whether multiple boxes will be used for the product during shipping (for example, custom build computer incl. monitor) or not:
- Congratulations, you just finished configuring inventory management in Magento 2.