Product Stocks
The Inventory Manager also offers the ability to keep track of product stocks in each and every shop of a merchant. This is done through a maintenance function that updates the total amount of products in a specific location, and also allows the creation of notification thresholds, in case you want to receive an email warning you when a product stock is running lower.
The requirements for modifying/maintaining the stocks of one or several products are:
- The id of the shop the product is located. You need to create and retrieve the shop data in advance through the User Manager.
- The stock amount you want to update the product with. This amount is the new current total.
- Optionally, you can set both a threshold limit to receive notifications (ie: setting 5 will send you a notification when the product stock is equal or lower than 5), and a note to keep track on the update reason (ie "New shipment received").
- The product id to be updated and the catalogue id it belongs to. See Maintain Product Catalogues for complete information. Note that you can maintain the stock for several shops with a single call.
Tip
Support for multiple shops can be useful, for example, to build functionality to check if a product is available from another store, which is close by, if the shop that the consumer is in has run out of a certain product.
You can retrieve as well the stock of a single product by using the product stock function. Note that this will respond with the stock of a single product in all the shops, and for having stock of more than one product you are required to do separate queries.
Note
If the merchant chooses to have ERP integration, the product stock feature becomes read only, and no maintenance/update is possible through the ePOS SDK. See the Inventory Manager Overview for more information about storing product data in an ERP versus storing product data locally.