Product inventory

What is a WooCommerce multi-store setup, in the first place?

WooCommerce multi-store is a network of connected WooCommerce stores, which may share some of their data. Your multistore can be:

• A WooCommerce Multisite installation – when stores exist within the same WordPress Multisite network.
• Completely standalone WooCommerce stores also count as a multistore setup.

Below, I will also guide you on the difference between having a WordPress multisite network installed and using separate stores.

You will also find a list of plugins that you may use to establish the connection between WooCommerce stores in a WooCommerce multi-store setup to sync some of the data between them, for example: products, product stock, orders, customers, cart.

Let’s just get started, and I’m going to uncover it step by step.

In this tutorial, I’ll show you how to set up an automatic product stock reset in a WooCommerce store. For example, let’s assume that “Product A” has a stock quantity of “10” at the beginning of the day. During the day, it may have some sales, but it doesn’t matter how many sales it had; you want it to have the same stock quantity tomorrow morning.

You may need functionality like this as a part of risk management measures, or maybe you just need to launch only a limited amount of sales of a specific digital product.

Anyway, below we will take a look at two methods on how we can perform an automatic daily (or weekly or whatever) stock reset on your WooCommerce store – we’ll use a programmatic approach, and I will also show how to do it using two stores and a plugin.

In this tutorial, I will show you how to configure central stock for WooCommerce using a plugin, but we will also take a look at the programmatic approach.

In this guide, I will show you multiple methods of setting up shared stock (shared inventory) for specific products in your WooCommerce store (or stores).

But first of all, there are two completely different WooCommerce configurations, and we will uncover both of them in the tutorial below:

1. Different products within a single WooCommerce store share the same stock – we will talk about this configuration in the first part of the tutorial.
2. Products across different WooCommerce stores should have a shared stock set up. The stores actually can be sub-stores within a single WooCommerce Multisite network or completely standalone stores – it doesn’t matter here. Usually, the goal of this approach is to manage stock in one central location. This is what the second part of the guide is about.

Let’s dive into it.

In this tutorial, we will discuss WooCommerce stock management for variations. Specifically, I want to share with you different approaches to setting up a shared stock for WooCommerce product variations.

The common ways of implementing a variation shared stock are:

1. Using the shared stock for all variations of a specific product.
2. Assigning the same SKU for specific variations (doesn’t matter whether they belong to the same product or different products) and reducing stock for all variations with the same SKU synchronously. This approach can be implemented with the plugin.
3. Combining specific variations into a group, and if any variation from the group has been purchased, we will reduce the stock levels of the whole group.
4. Assigning a stock quantity to a specific attribute and then managing the inventory on the attribute level.

For most of the ways mentioned above, I will show you the programmatic approach (with a code snippet), except for the one that will require the use of a WordPress plugin.

Now, let’s dive straight into it.