WooCommerce Stock Status and Management- A Complete Guide

Managing an online store is as challenging as a physical store. Keeping control of all the inventory, in-stock, and out-of-stock products becomes difficult as your online business starts growing. So, it is extremely important to have an all-in-one plugin that is capable of handling all the complexities of an online store.The best one for this purpose is WooCommerce, which is preferred by many professionals.It is an open-source WordPress plugin that makes the task easier for you by offering WooCommerce stock status and management options.

What is WooCommerce Stock Status Management?

WooCommerce provides a service with the help of which you can find out how much stock is left after every buy. You can also get notified when the product goes out of stock or is left below the threshold number you have set.Keep scrolling to see how you can do that using your WooCommerce plugin on your WordPress website.

WooCommerce Stock Status Settings

Inventory setting is the first step in Woocommerce stock status and management regime. For custom stock status options, WooCommerce inventory settings must be aligned. Follow the below-mentioned steps to get started.

Login to your admin panel, and from the side panel, go to WooCommerce.
Choose Products from the tab and click inventory written below the products tab.
In the inventory window, enable the Manage Stock option.
Set the Hold Stock time in minutes. It means that if a customer buys a product and doesn’t proceed to check out, the store holds his product for the specified time. After that time, the order is canceled automatically.
Enable low stock and out-of-stock notifications and specify your email address in the Notification Recipient tab to get notified.
There is a low stock threshold option available. You can set it to the desired number. You will receive a notification email when the number of products left in stock is below this threshold.
Next, set out of stock threshold to zero, and enable the out-of-stock visibility option. It will show the out-of-stock on the catalog when the product is unavailable.
Next, a stock display format option allows you to show the quantity remaining in the inventory. You can choose different options as per choice, as only show when the stock left is low or always show, etc.
Save the changes and move to the product section.

WooCommerce Stock Management at Product Level

The next step in WooCommerce stock status management is to add the product settings. There can be two types of products in inventory: simple and variable.A simple product is a product with no variants available, e.g., a specific book or a pen. A variable product offers different options for customers, e.g., a shirt might have different colors or sizes to choose from.First, let's look at how WooCommerce adds stock status settings for a simple product.

WooCommerce Stock Status Management for Simple Product

For this purpose:

Go back to the side panel and click on Products
All the listed products will appear on the screen. You will need to choose each product one by one and apply custom stock status WooCommerce settings.
Choose the product you want to apply the settings on.
Scroll down to reach the panel below the product data box and select inventory.
Create a unique code for your product in the SKU (Stock Keeping Unit) tab for recognition and record. It can be anything like 110 or ACS-10, separate the product from other items.
Choose the Manage Stock option to enable stock management at the product level.
Add the number of items available in the Stock Quantity tab.
If you are running out of the product currently, select from allow the backorders options. You can choose Don’t allow or Allow but notify customers. If you choose the latter, the customer can book the order and receive one once the item is restocked.
Next, you can set the threshold level of the individual product by setting the value in the low stock threshold tab.
Click update to save the changes.

You can apply the steps mentioned above to all the simple products. Now, let's look at the settings of custom stock status WooCommerce offers for variable products.

WooCommerce Stock Status Management for Variable Product

Your inventory might contain variants of a single product, e.g., a shirt with different sizes and colors. WooCommerce stock status options allow you to set different stock details.Let’s see how you can do that.

Choose the product whose variants you want to set.
Choose Variable Product from the Product Databox.
Select Variations from the list below the product box.
Select the variation from the Add Variation drop-down menu.
Enable Manage Stock Option and set the Stock Quantity, Low Stock Threshold, etc., as you want.
You can set the stock status for all the variations and the rest of the variable products by following the above mentioned steps.

WooCommerce Custom Stock Status

There may be cases you would like to add custom statuses for your stock availability text on checkout.Such as pre-order, backorder, contact before purchase…etc.In such situations you can add more stock status option either by using plugins or adding an extra code in your theme functions.php file.Custom Stock Status Plugins Custom Stock Status Code

Advantages of WooCommerce Stock Status and Management

Some advantages of the WooCommerce stock management system are as follows:

You don’t need to write down the details on paper or a separate spreadsheet for your inventory record.
You won’t miss any orders or sales due to inventory details mismanagement.
You can quickly and easily set up the WooCommerce management system.
You get notified automatically when a specific product is running low on stock or out of stock.
This plugin saves you time as you don’t have to worry much about stocks management.

How WooCommerce Stock Management Plugin Finpose Can Help?

Despite having most area of stock management covered, you will still find the management quite hectic and overwhelming. Due to this, it is extremely necessary to rely on any stock management plugin that runs on automation. Here are some of the features provided by Finpose.

Stock status management
Average unit cost calculation
Profit margin calculation
Category filters
Projected run out dates

These features can ease up the stock management to a significant extent. You should definitely give it a try.

The Wrap-Up

We are concluding with the note that if you don’t want to miss out on your sales and orders from your online store, WooCommerce stock status and management can be of great help. Enlist all your products on your website, and set the stock status using the steps we have written above for you. This will be enough to ease up lots of load.Photo by cottonbro from Pexels