Inventory tracking in X-Cart is based on SKUs assigned to simple products and product variants like different sizes or colors. Generally,
inventory tracking can refer to many things, including:
automating stock level adjustments and maintaining an accurate count of how many of each of your products are available for purchase;
sending low stock notifications to the store administrator and vendors;
communicating stock levels and product availability to your customers;
setting up out-of-stock product behavior.
The initial product in-stock availability is defined by the product owner (admin or vendor) in the store back-end, either on the product listing or product details pages or via bulk editing to update inventory for more than one product.
Product Listing
Product Details
Bulk Edit
Whereas the Prices & Inventory section of the Info tab of the product details allows adjusting some basic product inventory tracking properties, you can access still more settings via the Inventory Tracking tab. You can partially adjust these settings for multiple products via a bulk editing tool.
Arrival date: This field allows you to specify when the product will be available in your store. On its own, the information entered in this field serves purely informational purposes, but X-Cart add-ons may employ it.
NOTE: For example, if used with the Product Advisor add-on, you can mark specific products in your catalog as "Coming soon" and publish their expected arrival date on the storefront. The status of such products will automatically switch to "New arrival" on the date they become available.
Inventory tracking: The toggle enables inventory tracking for a product. With the inventory tracking feature, you can specify the number of product units you initially have (using the "Quantity in stock" field; see below).
NOTE: Every time someone buys a product, the number in the "Quantity in stock" field will be reduced automatically by the number of units that have been purchased. If you have a stock refill, you edit the value in the "Quantity in stock" field, increasing the value by the number of units you require. As a result, you can tell how many units of the product you have in stock at any time. If the product quantity is unlimited and does not need tracking, the "Inventory tracking" toggle can be disabled.
Quantity in stock: Use this field to set the inventory level (the number of product units in stock).
Show low stock warning on the product page: Enable this setting if you want a warning message (like "Only X left in stock") to display to customers if the product stock reaches the low stock threshold.
To enable the warning, you need to specify the inventory level at which the notification should be triggered (Use the "Low limit quantity" field further below in this section).
NOTE: You can edit the text of the warning message by editing the "Only X left in stock" text label. For information on text labels and how to edit them, see Managing Texts Labels.
Notify administrator if this product's stock quantity goes below a certain limit: Enable this setting to get an automated email notification when the product stock reaches the low stock threshold. You will also need to specify the inventory level at which the email notification needs to be sent in the Low stock threshold field below.
Low stock threshold: Use this field to set the low limit quantity for the product (starting from this quantity, the product stock level will be considered "low").
The accurate count of how many of each of your products are available for purchase is maintained automatically by the system. The stock adjustment is made after every successful product purchase.
A store admin can regulate whether to display the out-of-stock items using the "How to show the out-of-stock products" setting on the Cart & Checkout page in the store's Admin area (Store > Cart & Checkout).
This is how different inventory options are displayed on the storefront.
NOTE: If you select to hide the out-of-stock product as the "How to show the out-of-stock products" option value, all products with zero stock value will not be displayed in the storefront. To make the coming soon items visible, set a positive in-stock value for the product and specify a future arrival date.
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