Warehouse Management

Warehouse management in 21.Commerce

The Shop has a warehouse management system which allows you to manage the stock per article. In addition, there are many other peripheral systems which influence the warehouse management.

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Configuration of warehouse management

Stock settings are configured in the “Shop Administration” in the “Articles” → “Stock management” menu.

In the Shop default setting, warehouse management is switched off by default. To switch it on and to be able to make further settings for the warehouse management, you have to switch to the administration menu and go to the category ‘Warehouse management’.

Short information: An article can have three storage characteristics:

• always in stock: These articles are considered to be available at very short notice.
• reorderable: Article can be procured again at the mentioned delivery times
• not reorderable: discontinued items / unique items – cannot be reordered

You can see the following setting options in the warehouse management screen:

Enable / disable warehouse management

With the first setting ‘warehouse management’ the warehouse management can be switched on and off. If Warehouse Management is turned off, all created inventory levels and minimum inventory levels of an item are ignored. The articles can be ordered without restrictions regardless of their stock and the stocks are not updated when orders are placed.

Stock update

With ‘Stock Update’ you can control when the PepperShop subtracts the stock of an item from the ordered quantity. Here you can choose between two possibilities:

• After completing an order: As soon as a customer completes an order successfully, the stock is corrected directly by the shop.
• manual: The shop does not correct the stock levels for incoming orders automatically. This behavior is usually desired when external systems, e.g. an ERP, manages the warehouse stocks and delivers changes via shop synchronization.

Notification when the minimum stock level is reached

This setting controls how the warning is forwarded to the shop operator (administrator) if the minimum stock level of an article is reached.

If you decide for manual, there will be no notification for the administrator(!). This can be desirable if the complete inventory management is carried out, for example, via an external ERP application. You can also have the undershooting report sent to you ‘by e-mail’. An e-mail will be sent to the address configured in ‘Shop Settings’ → ‘General Settings’. If you prefer a passive notification, the PepperShop can also ‘create a log entry’ for each underrun notification. We will describe later how to open and analyze log files.

Customer sees stock

The configuration item ‘Customer sees warehouse stock’ controls whether the customer can see the current warehouse stocks or not. This involves the stock display, which is displayed as standard above the number of pieces. There are three possible configurations here:

• Exact stock levels: Often used in closed B2B shops to provide accurate information about the stock. By means of a short text display the stock of articles is displayed. If the minimum stock level is reached and ‘can be reordered’ or ‘cannot be reordered’ is used as configuration, ‘only X pieces in stock’ will be displayed additionally. It also shows when an article should be available again (if reorderable, source: available in field).

In the article detail view and with single-level article representation:

The following views do not distinguish between the storage behaviour:

• Two-level article display, single-column: … slice
• Two-level article display, multi-column: Warehouse: … slice
• Shopping cart and order overview:Stock: … slice

Traffic light system (red, yellow, green): This is the most common form of display in the B2C sector. It is to show to inform your customers roughly about the availability, but not immediately show the exact stock levels. The status yellow is used if an article falls below the minimum stock quantity and has configured a storage behaviour ‘reorderable’ or ‘not reorderable’. In the following example, you can see a traffic light display for a parent/subarticle:

Overbooking of not orderable articles

Here you control the overbooking protection of the shop: If you set this setting to yes and deactivate protection, the article may be overbooked. This is explicitly desired by some shop operators. By default, however, the PepperShop prevents overbooking of items that cannot be ordered with the configuration selection: no.

Overbooking protection is based on a reservation system: if overbooking is prevented, the PepperShop decrements a virtual article stock each time a customer places an article in his shopping basket. In this way, overbooking can no longer occur, as items reserved in this way are no longer available for purchase. If the customer does not complete the purchase later, however, the virtually reserved stock quantity will be released for purchase again after the end of the session. The session runtime is usually one hour. Especially with unique items it can happen that articles do not appear in the shop at short notice and are then displayed again.

As a shop owner, you have to decide for yourself whether you want to take an overbooking risk or prevent it and accept that a customer willing to buy may not be able to buy the item because it is currently reserved.

Inventory – Show all items

View stocks: In the warehouse management you will find some text links below, which visualize the current warehouse situation in the shop.

For an inventory, the purchase prices are often also displayed and added up, so that the value of the warehouse at the time of display can easily be determined for accounting. This is also possible in the PepperShop, see appendix.

Application of warehouse management

Condition: The warehouse management can only be used if it is switched on.

Stock settings of an article

An article can have the following warehouse settings:

• Maximum order quantity: Defines the maximum number of items a customer can place in the shopping cart per order (independent of stock → only for items marked as ‘will not be reordered’).
• Minimum order quantity: Here you can specify how many articles must be ordered at a time.
• Minimum stock quantity: Minimum number of items in stock before a notification is sent.
• Stock: Number of items in stock
• Available in: Freely selectable text, e.g. ‘KW 21’, ‘3 days’, …
• Storage behavior: What should happen to the item when it reaches stock level 0?

Short Lookup Storage Types:

• always in stock - the item is available independent of stock level and a specified delivery period
• reorderable - the article can be reordered. Customers can order more items than are in stock.
• will not be reordered - Customers can only order as many items as are in stock. When the stock level reaches 0, the article is hidden and can no longer be ordered.

Stock settings of an article

There are three ways of influencing the warehouse settings of an article. This means changing the warehouse relevant data for the individual articles:

1. Per article: Via article editing mask: Product → ‘Edit product’ – at the bottom:

   

2. About the Articles Mass Mutations

   

   The adjustment via bulk management is the simplest and way to mutate fast and clearly all relevant data of the products. All possible settings are offered. The bulk management can be found under the navigation point ‘Product’ in the shop administration.

   

3. Via Warehouse Management

   

Stock postings can be made here. These can be provided with a note. If the account assignment module is available, a debit account can also be selected.

Note ‘negative stocks’

If the stock of a produc is in the negative range after an order and the notification is switched on, a notification will be made.

Attention: If you use Parent/Subarticle1 in your shop, you should avoid negative stock levels of subarticles as much as possible, as this may lead to an incorrect stock availability display in the product list (the system calculates with the sum of the subarticle stock levels).

Goods receipt / goods issue

Via ‘Shop Administration’ → ‘Stock management’ → ‘stock item entry’ the shop provides a simple mask with which you can record goods receipts quickly. You enter the item number and the number to be added and the shop adds the item to the corresponding stock on hand. You can also enter negative numerical values in this way, which corresponds to goods issues.

Manual capture / capture with barcode scanner

In the PepperShop you can enter incoming and outgoing goods manually and also well with a barcode scanner. A commercially available barcode scanner is operated in keyboard wedge mode for this purpose.

Further Help

Do you need further support? PepperShop provides you with different options.

• Often a click in the administration on the top right on the question mark icon helps. Here you can get direct help on the relevant topic.
• We are also available to you by email swiss21-support@peppershop.commailto:swiss21-support@peppershop.com)