One of the biggest issues of the Magento community edition is the laсk of product catalog management features. This problem occurs when your store wants to stand out from a dozen, a hundreds and more product items in catalog. To update a large amount of products can take days or even weeks with standard management features of Magento store. One of the most important and frequently used operations in the online stores is stock inventory management activities which include quantity of products and availability status of each particular product in catalog of online store. If you work with a large amount of products you will probably spend a lot of time on the products receipt from your suppliers and on maintaining a products catalog in accordance with your warehouse.
To solve this problem, you can use several ways to reduce dramatically the time that you spend on the maintenance of your stock inventory up to date and your warehouse status.
There are three main ways to do that:
- Edit inventory data through the admin user Magento interface
- Update inventory data through CSV/XML files
- Update inventory data by using third-party tools which are integrated with your Magento
The easiest way to keep your stock inventory data up to date in Magento is to use third-party extensions which improve your Magento user interface. The most popular extension which improves user interface of Magento stock inventory management is Stock Inventory Manager. As you may know the standard Magento user interface is routine and requires a lot of time to update a large number of products.
Stock Inventory Manager extension converts standard Magento product grid into editable product grid with mass actions. As a result features of Stock Inventory Manager extension allow you edit inventory level and status for each particular product right in products grid and save updates by clicking ‘Save’ button. Mass actions of Stock Inventory Manager extension allows you apply the same type of update for big list of products. So you can just filter and select the required products and apply the same update value to these products. This extension supports absolute and relative values. Absolute values mean, that you can set final count for stock level, where relative values mean, that you can set only how much new products you received to warehouse or how much products you have out from warehouse by using + (plus) or – (minus) operators.
