Getting started with Inventory allocations

Inventory allocations give you control over how inventory is pushed to your sales channels, ensuring that customers always access inventory levels that match your goals.

Key use cases for inventory allocations include:

• Reserving inventory for a specific channel
• Keeping a buffer to protect against backorders
• Stopping sales on a particular store or channel
• Pre-selling incoming quantities

The inventory allocation concept

An allocation is a layer between the real Bigblue inventory and your sales channels. It allows to tweak the values shown as available on the each of your sales channels to follow your business objectives.

For example, if you have 100 units at the warehouse, you might want to push 30 units to your B2B store, push 50 units to your B2C store, and keep 30 units as a buffer for manual orders. Allocated values don’t have to match any physical inventory.

Requirements

Inventory allocations are part of the Bigblue Advanced plan and above. If inventory allocations don’t show while you are on an eligible plan, or for information about Bigblue Advanced Plan pricing, contact us.

Set-up checklist before using inventory allocations

Allocations are used to control inventory across different channels. For the inventory values synced with your channels to be correct, several checks must be conducted upfront:

1. Make sure all your shops are properly connected to Bigblue
2. Make sure products are linked
3. Make sure inventory is properly synced
4. Make sure all orders impacting inventory are properly synced.
   1. Optional: If you are doing B2B pre-sales and want unpaid orders to be synced and held to reserve inventory. Contact us to enable this.
   2. Optional: If you offer payment terms to Shopify B2B customers and need to sync unpaid orders, make sure order synchronization is enabled.

Incompatible features

Inventory allocations are still under development and the following features are currently not supported jointly with allocations:

1. Product bundles.
2. Orders created by API and by SFTP
3. CMSs such as Magento and Wix.

If you are using one of these features and want to use inventory allocations, please reach out to us.

Set up your first allocation

Select the use case that best match your needs and follow the steps:

1. Save inventory for B2B
2. Pre-sell inventory
3. Create and use inventory buffers
4. Stop sales on a product

Once created, if you still have some questions, you might find answers in

Frequent allocation questions