Shopify inventory tracking and management

Good inventory tracking and management are crucial to a Shopify merchant’s success. Ineffective inventory management can lead to overstocking, increased costs, delayed orders and deliveries, and customer unhappiness. This article will show you how to track your Shopify inventory with a Mixtable spreadsheet, manage your inventory across products and locations, and sync the data back to Shopify.

Shopify inventory tracking with the Mixtable Spreadsheet Editor

Tracking inventory is done extremely easily via a spreadsheet interface. You can:

• track how much inventory you have in stock for a product or variant,
• track inventory across multiple locations,
• share inventory information with others,
• and export your inventory to an Excel file.

Note: Before we show how to track Shopify inventory with a Mixtable spreadsheet, it’s important to explain how Shopify stores inventory. In Shopify, inventory quantities are related to variants, not products. This is always the case, even if you haven’t added any variants to a product as Shopify always auto-creates a variant for every product in its own database. This inventory-variant relationship is important to understand as we set up inventory tracking/updates in Mixtable.

Update: Use the Inventory pre-built spreadsheet template

After installing the Mixtable Spreadsheet Editor app, you can now use the Create a workbook button and load a blank workbook or use the pre-built Inventory template to start quickly.

• The Inventory template contains the product variants’ names and handles
• Plus all inventory-related data, including information per location.

Managing inventory from a Products - Complete (with Variants) worksheet

Here are the steps to get your inventory data into your existing worksheets.

1. Open a Products - Complete (with Variants) worksheet (here’s how to do this with Mixtable)
2. Find a column that is currently empty, and right-click on the header of the column (the header contains the column’s letter)

1. Click on the Shopify Sync Settings option

2. In the Shopify Sync Settings interface that opens, select the Inventory radio button

3. You will now see a dropdown containing the various inventory locations that you have set up in Shopify. Select the location whose inventory you want to map into the column as well as the type of inventory you want to display. The types of inventory you can sync are as follows:

   • Available - Can sync from Shopify to Mixtable and from Mixtable to Shopify
   • Committed - Shopify to Mixtable only
   • Damaged - Shopify to Mixtable only
   • Incoming - Shopify to Mixtable only
   • On Hand - Shopify to Mixtable only
   • Quantity Control - Shopify to Mixtable only
   • Reserved - Shopify to Mixtable only
   • Safety stock - Shopify to Mixtable only

4. Click on the Save button

5. The Shopify Sync Settings interface will close, and you will see the column populate with each variant’s inventory at the selected location

6. Repeat the steps above for any other locations whose inventory you’d like to map to a column

Setting inventory quantities from your Mixtable spreadsheet

Once you’ve loaded your existing inventory at each location in your spreadsheet, managing that inventory is as easy as 1-2-3.

1. To set the inventory for a particular product/variant, just find the relevant cell and change its value.
2. You’ll see the cell background turn light yellow, indicating that the new value hasn’t yet been synced to Shopify.
3. To get this process underway, just click on the Sync sheet to Shopify button at the top-right hand corner of the screen and Mixtable will sync the inventory quantity to Shopify.

When using Mixtable to track and manage your Shopify store inventory, you can also use Excel formulas as long as it makes sense for your business.

Example: If you have inventory at three locations and you supply two of them from one main location, you can use an Excel formula to automatically recalculate the stock you currently have at the main location.

Inventory changes sync automatically from Shopify to Mixtable

The Mixtable worksheet will also reflect any inventory changes made in your Shopify store. If you have your workbook open when the change comes in from Shopify, the updated cell will be highlighted for a few seconds in a light green color.