How Magento MSI Solved Offline Inventory Problem in POS App?
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Multi-Source Inventory (MSI) allows you to manage the inventory of a product by source (location) within the Magento 2 webstore.
Magento manages a single inventory system for each product. Therefore, it gets difficult to manage multi-channel inventories for a single website.
However, after the MSI feature release in Magento 2.3 merchants can manage the inventory for each of the channels easily.
You can manage the inventory of a single product for multiple locations by allocating the sources to different locations.
This feature has come in handy to solve the inventory management within our Magento 2 POS system allowing us to create a separate set of inventories for different sources.
Consider that the POS system is working in offline mode and you have assigned the main product with a quantity of 100 (50 for the web store and 50 for the retail POS outlet). Now the issue that can arise is if the salesperson sells out more than 50 quantities.
Now, when the POS system comes online then there will be issues with the inventory sync. What this means is that there will be no actual physical stock available to ship for the extra orders that have come through the POS system.
This is taken care of by the MSI system, where the store owner can now create and manage the inventory of a product by location wise.
The stock assigned to the locations and each location’s respective inventory is separate from the web.
The Source and Stock
We shall see how we can make use of the MSI feature to manage the inventory within the Point Of Sale system.
In the POS system, for each outlet, we have to select the option “Source“. This source can be created by navigating through Stores>Inventory>Sources and clicking the Add New Source button.
Manage Source:
If we are selling products from multi-locations and others then we will need to create sources for each inventory location.
Manage Stock:
Here we will need to create stock for each channel (Magento websites, if there are multi websites present in your Magento) so that we can assign sources (from where we are selling our products) for each channel.
After, we can assign the stock to the product by navigating to the edit product page and clicking the Assign Sources button.
How Multi-Source Inventory Helped?
In the backend of the POS System, we have created an Outlet and for each outlet, we have the option to select a source that we already created from the Source part of the MSI. Here, we have attached Source as Delhi.
Now, below we have a product Joust Duffle Bag that is having inventory for Delhi =33 and in Noida =47.
Now, let’s make checkout using the same product within the POS system by tapping the Pay button.
After this, you can see the success message as well for the placed order.
The stock has been reduced from the assigned source for this particular outlet.
This is the stock assignment for separate locations. And how each location’s respective inventory is separate i.e Separate for the web and separate for all the created sources.
That is all for the Magento multi source inventory. If you have any doubts or want to know more get back to us at support@webkul.com