Product inventory

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 how to implement a multi-store WooCommerce stock synchronisation (for products with the same SKU, slug, or “GTIN, UPC, EAN, or ISBN” field).

We will use two different approaches to achieve that:

• Using the Inventory Sync for WooCommerce plugin,
• Programmatically, without using any plugins.

Let’s get started.

But before we start – one more thing. If your goal is to sync stock for products with the same SKU within the same WooCommerce store, you probably need a different solution; in that case, the Duplicate SKU Stock Sync plugin is what you would need.

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 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.