Introduction
Onport provides automatic inventory syncing across all your sales channels. In this article, we'll explain the logic behind inventory syncing and the meaning behind the inventory levels you'll find within our app.
The inventory source of truth
If you go to Integrations > e-Commerce Platform > Channel Name > Inventory and Pricing tab, you have 3 options:
1) Sync all inventory updates: Onport will be the inventory master, syncing inventory quantities between your store, inventory feeds and in-house warehouses - and back.
2) Only sync inventory feeds: Onport will be the inventory master for products connected to inventory feeds, while all other items will be managed in your store.
3) Don't sync inventory: Onport is not the inventory master. All inventory management will be done in your store or any connected apps.
Understanding inventory levels
To view more information on the inventory levels of an item, click on the inventory quantity while in the main inventory section or within a sale. This will open a popup showing inventory allocation, vendor feeds, recent sales, among other important details:
You'll see that there are 3 different inventory levels to help you understand and keep track of your inventory. This is what each one means:
- Allocated: The total number of items reserved for orders that have not yet been shipped.
- Stocked: Total quantity of items in the warehouse, including those that are already sold but not yet shipped to customers.
- Available: This is the total number of items in the warehouse or inventory feed, excluding items allocated to sales. This is the value that you have available to allocate to other sales orders and is the value synced with your online stores - Available = Stocked - Allocated.
How to manually manage stock levels
While the default setting is that your stock will be automatically synced with that of your vendors, it might be that you want to manually change it.
❗️In this case, it is important to know that managing the stock should not be done through your store, as doing that will not be reflected on your Onport account. In other words, stock should not be managed in your Shopify store once it has been connected to Onport. Instead, you can manage your stock directly from your Onport account.
1. How to do this
You can make quick adjustments to your inventory levels directly by navigating to the Inventory tab and adjusting the number per product (found on the right-hand side of each product). This will give you quick access to the inventory, however, it won’t leave any record of why this was adjusted. 
2. How to leave a record
If you are looking to be adjusting inventory on a regular basis, and want to leave a record of doing so, you can do it by navigating to Inventory > In House > Replenishments:
How to manage inventory directly in your store
If you prefer managing inventory levels directly from your store, you can do so. Just ensure you follow these steps so that the system recognizes that stock is managed from the store:
1) Navigate to Integrations and click on the store
2) Click Inventory and Pricing and choose “Don’t sync inventory” under Inventory sync
3) Save
After this setting has been turned on, you can go ahead and manage the stock levels from your store. The way to do this is by going to Products > Click on the product you want to manage > Adjust the quantity
Tip: You may want to use a third-party app, such as Zero Øut (Shopify only) to manage your inventory feeds for you (hiding sold-out items automatically).
Allow your vendor to manually update stock in the Vendor Portal
Read this section of the Vendor Portal Overview article first to make sure you have the required settings enabled in your account for the vendors to onboard themselves and to be able to edit the inventory quantities through the vendor portal.
1) Once the inventory feed is uploaded by your vendor in the vendor portal, you will also be able to see it in your Onport account under Inventory > Inventory Feeds.
2) After the products are published in your store, if you want the vendor to manage the stock in the vendor portal, you will need to do the following:
2.1) Disable the inventory feed from within Onport - this needs to be done in order to stop the inventory from updating based on the data coming from the feed.
2.2) Go to Contacts > (choose the vendor) > Products and change the option from "Sync from a store, file or API" to "Manually update inventory levels".
3) Now your vendor will be able to manually update inventory quantities from within the vendor portal:
Warehouse locations
A location represents a physical space within a warehouse where an item of stock can be held in, like a shelf or a bin.
This makes it possible to monitor how many items of a particular product are stored in a particular location at any one time. This makes picking inventory to fulfill shipments more efficient by indicating exactly where in the warehouse the picker needs to go to find the item.
Locations can be specified for a product from two places. The first is when editing a variant under the "inventory levels" section. Just click the "Add location link". You can specify the location in any format.
Secondly, warehouse locations can be set when fulfilling or receiving items on a shipment. Just click the "set location" link for the item you want to change.
🔎 For more information on how the in-house model works, read this article.
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