Planning Your Subscriptions Inventory Needs
Planning Your Subscriptions Inventory Needs
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The Inventory Planning Report helps you ensure you have the right amount of inventory to fulfill all your upcoming subscription orders so you can avoid running out-of-stock, and provide customers with an uninterrupted delivery of their favorite products.
In this article, you'll learn how to get the inventory information you need to ensure you're always in-stock for subscription orders, and always meeting customer demand.
How it works
The Inventory Planning Report gives you a real-time projection of the upcoming inventory you’ll need for each product, based on the time you check your report.
The Inventory Planning Report will give you the following two main data points:
- In-stock today: The current quantity of a particular product that is available for sale, and is directly based on your Shopify Inventory levels.
- Needed next 7, 14, 30, 60, 90 days: The projected quantity needed to fulfill subscription orders for a given product over the next 7, 14, 30, 60, and 90 days.
When you consider these two data points together, you can easily start to plan how many units you’ll need to order or scale back on for a given product.
For example: If you see that you have 30 units in-stock today for a product called “Daily facial cleanser 5oz”, and that 60 units are needed for the next 30 days, you can easily know that you’ll need to order more units of “Daily facial cleanser 5oz”, or to ensure that enough have been ordered or are on their way.
Tip:
The projections are based on current subscription sales, and won’t include new subscription orders or subscription cancellations that may occur during this time period. To optimize your inventory planning, take into account additional product units that may be needed as a result of potential new subscription orders during the upcoming period.
Understanding your upcoming inventory needs
To get a snapshot of your upcoming inventory needs for a given product:
- From the main menu, go to Analytics.
- Select Inventory Planning.
- Search for a specific product and variant title in the search bar at the top of the table.
- You'll see the In-Stock quantity for the given product, and the units Needed next 7, 14, 30, 60, and 90 Days.
Here's a breakdown of your Inventory Planning information:
| Inventory Planning Information | Description |
|---|---|
| Product | The product title as it appears in your Shopify store Note: You can search the report by product title to get inventory projections per product |
| Variant | The variant title as it appears in your Shopify store Note: If a product has a variant, you can search the report by product and variant title to get inventory projections per product variant |
| SKU | The unique SKU (stock keeping unit) you've assigned to each product variant in Shopify. Learn more about SKUs in the Shopify Help Center |
| In-Stock Today | This is the current quantity of a particular product that is available for sale at the time you're viewing the report, and is directly based on your Shopify Inventory levels |
| Needed Next 7 Days | The projected quantity needed to fulfill subscription orders for the next 7 days |
| Needed Next 14 Days | The projected quantity needed to fulfill subscription orders for the next 14 days |
| Needed Next 30 Days | The projected quantity needed to fulfill subscription orders for the next 30 days |
| Needed Next 60 Days | The projected quantity needed to fulfill subscription orders for the next 60 days |
| Needed Next 90 Days | The projected quantity needed to fulfill subscription orders for the next 90 days |
Please note:
If you haven't activated Inventory Tracking in Shopify, you'll see a 0 in your In-stock today column for that product. Learn more about Inventory Tracking in the Shopify Help Center.
Next steps
In addition to checking your Inventory in the Inventory Planning Report, you can receive notifications about subscriptions that include out of stock products by going to Settings > Notifications > Store Owner, and toggling on Low stock alert. This will send you an email if a product falls below the predicted stock needed for subscription orders in the next 7, 14, 30, 60, and 90 days.
To learn more about out of stock management, see Managing Out of Stock Products in Subscriptions.
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