Inventory tracking: how it works in CS-Cart

We are often asked how to deal with the inventory tracking and what level of automation can be achieved in CS-Cart for the product stock control. Below we outline the way to make working with product quantities completely seamless.

First of all, you may enable or disable the tracking not only for the store as a whole, but also for individual products, meaning you can decide which items should be considered ‘unlimited’ and which not.

Moreover, each product can be tracked either with or without options. You can choose whether to count, for example, different size and color combinations or simply treat the item as a whole.

It’s definitely convenient to control the product availability not only when it has reached the zero limit but to know beforehand that the quantity is running low and it’s time to buy some extra. That is why we have made it possible for a store administrator to receive low-stock product notifications either by email or SMS.

Still, you may wish to keep even items with negative quantities available for sale in case you can quickly increase the stock and ship new orders. For such a case, CS-Cart allows to enable or disable negative stock values for the store’s inventory.

Since CS-Cart provides a configurable system of order statuses, we’ve included the possibility to set whether to increase or decrease the stock level when an order gets a particular status. For, example, this allows to automate the inventory management for returned or canceled orders so that items are automatically returned in stock, or, on the contrary, decrease the quantities for shipped items.

Product quantities can also be controlled via import/export, so it’s possible to synchronize the data with external applications using CSV format and keep the stock information up-to-date.

Finally, you may define what minimum/maximum number of a particular item can be included within each individual order and choose the step of product quantity (as well as the number of steps) available for a customer to choose.

Therefore, as you can see, CS-Cart’s inventory tracking is fully automated and configurable, so you can keep your stock organized in a no-hassle way!