Introduction

The reason you set up a store is to sell products. One of the most important tasks that you have is to add, present, and administer your products in your store. When you use Inventory tracking, depending on how you set it up, MIVA Merchant will track your product stock levels, identify back-ordered and out-of-stock items to your customers. You can even hide the products that are currently out of stock.

MIVA Merchant Inventory, lets you do the following:

1. Activate Inventory and enter default stock levels and messages.

2. Enter product specific stock levels and messages

   - enter data directly in the Edit Product Inventory form
   - import the inventory data

Before you initiate inventory tracking, you should put your store in Maintenance Mode. Otherwise, it will be quite probable that your inventory tracking levels will not start with the proper quantities.

To view the Inventory form:

In the Administration menu, on the left, perform the following:

1. Click the triangle next to Stores.

2. Click the triangle next to the Store's name.

3. Select the Inventory link.

Inventory Descriptions

When you turn on Track Inventory, MIVA Merchant can keep track of your products' stock levels. In the Inventory form, you set which stock levels to track, the stock levels, and stock messages.

Stock Levels

You can set the default stock levels on the Inventory form, which you can apply to all, most or some products. Then, when you track inventory for a product, you can set specific stock levels or use the default stock levels that you set in this Inventory form.

Stock Messages

Inventory also contains generic or default messages. As with the stock levels, you can choose to use the generic messages for all your products, or enter specific messages for a product.

The default for these messages contain tokens, which are variables for the product name, code, and stock levels. These tokens are identified at the bottom of the Inventory page in the Administrative Interface.

You can keep the supplied stock level messages, or change them to ones that may be more useful for your store. For example, the default Low Stock Message indicates that the product is back-ordered, and there may be a delay in shipping. If you want, you could change this to say "Buy 'em fast we've only got %inv-available% left!" which would display as "Buy 'em fast we've only got 3 left!"

Inventory Settings Tab

To set up inventory tracking and messages:

1. 1. Check Track Inventory.

   2. If you want to track products' low stock levels:

      - Check Track Low Stock Level.
      
      - Enter the Low Stock Level quantity.
      
      - Keep the provided Low Stock Messages, or modify them for your specific requirements.

1. 3. If you want to track products' sold out levels:

      - Check Track Out of Stock Level.

      - If desired, check Hide Out of Stock Products.

      - Enter the Out of Stock Level quantity.

      - Keep the provided Out of Stock Messages, or modify them for your specific requirements.

   4. Modify the other messages as you desire.

      - In Stock Messages

      - Limited Stock Messages

The long messages appear in the Expanded format of the Product List Layout, Search Layout, and Product Layout. The messages also appear in Product Descriptions and the Basket.

Email Notification Tab

You might choose to send an e-mail to your product's supplier, copying in either your store managers, yourself, or both, when a product's inventory level is low or out.

To set up Email Notification:

1. 1. Check when to send Inventory Email: when stock is low, out, or both.

   2. Enter data for the required fields (bold items must contain an entry):

If you are sending an Email to a supplier, your Email message might read:

%product_name% stock level is currently %inv_level%. Please fill our standard order. Thank you.

If the inventory level were low and the product is posters, this message would read:

Posters stock level is currently low. Please fill our standard order. Thank you.

1. 3. Optionally, enter Email address(es) in CC for courtesy copies.

   4. Click Update.

Edit Product Inventory Tab

When you turn on Track Inventory in Inventory Settings, each product will have a new link called Inventory, which is available when you edit a product. If you are tracking the inventory for only a few products, you could enter the product inventory data directly into the Inventory form of Edit Product. If you have quite a few products to track, it might be easier and quicker to import the product data, including the inventory data.

For each product, you can choose to use the settings that you set in the Store's Inventory form (which this publication describes), or select specific settings for some of your products. In Product Inventory, you can:

• Leave the Stock Messages text boxes empty or enter specific text for the product.

• Set whether or not to track each of the stock levels, or to use the Default settings.

• Set the product stock levels or use the Default settings.

For specific information on how to modify inventory for a product, refer to Add and Modify Products.

Import Inventory Data

You can import product data (the product's name, code, cost, description, image URLs, and more) and the product's inventory data. The inventory data includes all the stock levels and messages:

• Adjust Stock By

• Track Product Inventory

• In Stock, Low Stock, Out of Stock, and Limited Stock messages

• Track Low Stock and Out of Stock Levels

• Hide Out of Stock Products