Inventory

• On this Page

  • Stock
  • Locations
  • Levels
  • Transactions
  • Transfers
  • Fulfillment

Commerce 5 features a sophisticated new multi-warehouse inventory management system, supported by transfers and atomic inventory transactions.

Stock

“Stock” is now tracked for each purchasable (or SKU, traditionally) in each configured location.

You will encounter inventory primarily within each variant’s edit screen. To start tracking stock, turn on Inventory, then use the action menu in any location’s Available column to Set or Adjust stock to or by a specific quantity. Changes to inventory levels are tracked as transactions—including when altered via transfers.

Inventory information is available in your templates, as well. This example disables <select> menu options that report having no inventory, to prevent customers from trying to add them to the cart:

{# Assuming we’re on a product page... #}

<form method="post">
  {{ csrfInput() }}
  {{ actionInput('commerce/cart/update-cart') }}

  <select name="purchasableId">
    {% for variant in product.variants %}
      {{ tag('option', {
        text: variant.title,
        value: variant.id,
        disabled: not variant.hasStock(),
      }) }}
    {% endfor %}
  </select>

  <button>Add to Cart</button>
</form>

Locations

Commerce tracks inventory with locations. Locations are defined globally, then associated with one or more stores.

To add a location, visit

1. Commerce→
2. Inventory→
3. Locations

, then click New location. Locations have a Name, Handle, and an address.

Inventory locations are attached to a store via the Inventory Locations setting in

1. Commerce→
2. Store Management→
3. General

.

When you check the stock of a purchasable, Commerce gets the total inventory across all locations associated with the store. Not all locations must be associated with a store—if you need to track stock that isn’t available to customers (or will be gradually released for sale via transfers), you can create additional “detached” locations.

Levels

To support a variety of fulfillment and handling processes, Commerce provides multiple distinct levels per location for each inventory item.

• On Hand (onHandTotal) — Combined total of available, committed, quality control, safety, reserved, and damaged.
• Available (availableTotal) — Total inventory available for purchase. When this reaches zero, the item is considered “out of stock” and will prevent orders from being completed.
• Committed (committedTotal) — Inventory allocated to completed (but unfulfilled) orders.
• Reserved (reservedTotal) — When stock is over-committed in one location, Commerce may
• Damaged (damagedTotal), Safety (safetyTotal), and Quality Control (qualityControlTotal) — Predefined designations that can be used to hold additional inventory that is not available for purchase.
• Incoming (incomingTotal) — Inventory that is expected to arrive via a transfer. This may be negative for locations designated as the source for Pending or Partial transfers.
• Unavailable (unavailableTotal) — Combined total of quality control, safety, reserved, and damaged.
• Fulfilled (fulfilled) — A special level used to track stock that is fulfilled from the Committed state. This level cannot be adjusted except via the order fulfillment screen.

Some inventory levels cannot be directly manipulated: Committed, for instance, is used exclusively for holding inventory after an order is completed, but prior to fulfillment. On Hand is synthesized from multiple other totals, but can be set—changes to it are actually applied to the Available inventory, allowing an employee counting inventory to update stock in the system without having to manually deduct committed or other non-available items.

Transactions

Any time inventory directly altered, changed in response to a completed order, or updated via a transfer, Commerce logs this as an inventory transaction. Transactions can be viewed in the History tab of any inventory item.

Commerce uses database transactions to isolate and roll back groups of inventory changes. Consider a transfer, which must simultaneously add stock to one location and deduct it from another: if one of those operations fails, they are reverted as a group, which can be safely retried later. This “atomicity” also means that concurrent updates to a single inventory value (like a transfer setting its Available quantity to 50 and its quantity being reduced by one as an order is completed) are guaranteed to be consistent, regardless which action actually happens first.

Transfers 5.1.0+

When you have two or more inventory locations configured, Commerce adds an Inventory Transfers screen to the control panel. Here, you can create and manage transfers of inventory between locations. A transfer encapsulates a list of inventory items and quantities and makes it possible to adjust many inventory levels at once.

You do not need to use transfers to update stock. In addition to representing a physical movement of inventory between locations, transfers can represent new stock entering your supply—say, from a virtual “Manufacturing” inventory location.

Like products and orders, transfers are elements, and therefore have a familiar interface, including statuses and custom fields.

Statuses

Inventory transfers have a fixed workflow comprised of four statuses to help prepare and visualize the movement of stock between locations.

Draft

Each transfer begins as a Draft. In this state, the manager can add inventory items, adjust quantities, and edit the Origin and Destination locations for the transfer.

Pending

When the transfer is ready to be finalized, a manager can mark it as Pending. This makes the transfer details read-only (specifically, the Origin, Destination, and inventory items), and exposes the item quantities as Incoming on the respective inventory items.

Received, Partial

The Received and Partial statuses are applied automatically after marking inventory as received via the Receive Inventory slideout.

A transfer is considered Received only when the total quantity for every inventory item has been marked as received.

If some portion of the inventory items or items’ quantity has been marked as received, a transfer is considered Partial. You may use the Receive Inventory tool as many times as necessary to complete a transfer—say, if it was split into multiple physical shipments.

Each time you Receive Inventory, the quantity you Accept is moved into the Available level, and the quantity you Reject is moved into

A transfer is considered Received even if you Reject some of the quantity when receiving inventory.

Rejecting part of a transfer reduces those items’ Incoming level, but doesn’t add it to any other level. If you reject inventory for specific reasons and want to track it in Commerce, consider using one of Reserved, Damaged, Safety, or Quality Control.

Field Layout

Additional data can be attached to a transfer by adding custom fields to its field layout in

1. Settings→
2. Commerce→
3. System Settings→
4. Transfers

.

Permissions

Any store managers who need to orchestrate inventory transfers must have the Manage inventory transfers permission.

Users do not need the Manage inventory stock levels permission to be able to execute transfers.

Fulfillment

When an order is completed, line items’ quantities are “committed” from the store’s inventory locations in a series of transactions. This process moves stock from the Available level to the Committed level. Later, when you use the Fulfillment action on a completed order, stock is moved from the Committed level to a special Fulfilled level.

Strategy

Inventory is committed according to these rules:

• Each purchasable in the order is handled discretely;
• Inventory for a line item is only ever Committed from a single location;
• Committing inventory may result in negative On-hand or Available levels;
• Additional inventory is Reserved in as many other locations are required to satisfy the total quantity;
• The order in which inventory locations are attached to a store is significant;
• An order may commit inventory across multiple locations;

Purchasables for which inventory management is disabled are not factored in to commitment and fulfillment logic. Custom line items are also excluded from these calculations.

Commerce starts by consolidating quantities for each purchasable in an order. That quantity is checked against each inventory location, in the order they are attached to the store: if enough inventory is available at one of them, that location is used; if none have enough available inventory, the first attached location is used.

Inventory movements are created against each line item to track how stock is committed and reserved, and saved to the database as transactions. The primary movement for each line item commits inventory from the chosen location; if that stock is exhausted, Commerce keeps track of a running “remainder,” which is later reserved from one or more additional locations. That remainder is treated as a single pool of stock, and no further attempts are made to group it by line item. Instead, Commerce reserves as much stock as is available from each subsequent location until the ordered quantity is satisfied.

Example

Suppose our store’s inventory looks like this (for clarity, we’ve omitted levels that Commerce would ordinarily display)…

SKU	Location A	Location B
ACME-WIDGET	25 Available 10 Committed 0 Reserved	163 Available 0 Committed 0 Reserved
ACME-FLASK	2 Available 0 Committed 0 Reserved	14 Available 0 Committed 10 Reserved
ACME-ALEMBIC	19 Available 0 Committed 0 Reserved	41 Available 0 Committed 6 Reserved

…and a customer completes an order with the following items:

• 10 × ACME-WIDGET
• 1 × ACME-FLASK (with custom engraving)
• 2 × ACME-FLASK
• 50 × ACME-ALEMBIC

Commerce sees three discrete purchasables, and decides that Location A can cover the ACME-WIDGET quantity, Location B has enough ACME-FLASK stock to cover the total quantity (across two line items), but no location has enough ACME-ALEMBIC, so it will default to Location A.

1. All ACME-WIDGET stock is committed from Location A in a single movement;
2. ACME-FLASK stock is committed in two movements from Location B:

• One from the first line item (“engraved”);
• Two from the second line item (no customization);

1. The ACME-ALEMBIC quantity is committed from Location A;

In this process, Commerce notes that Location A would be over-committed by 31 units of ACME-ALEMBIC, and creates an additional movement to reserve that stock in Location B. A total of five movements are executed against three purchasables or inventory items, and the final state would look like this (an asterisk indicates a changed level):

SKU	Location A	Location B
ACME-WIDGET	15 Available* 20 Committed* 0 Reserved	163 Available 0 Committed 0 Reserved
ACME-FLASK	2 Available 0 Committed 0 Reserved	11 Available* 3 Committed* 10 Reserved
ACME-ALEMBIC	-31 Available* 50 Committed* 0 Reserved	10 Available* 0 Committed 37 Reserved*

If customizations are provided via line items’ options array that affect where that item can be shipped or fulfilled from, consider making it a discrete variant.