Overview
Sellercloud’s Channel Warehouse feature lets you assign a unique warehouse to each of your sales channels and selectively send or receive inventory updates from and to specific locations. For example, if you sell on both Amazon and eBay but prefer to have dedicated warehouses for each platform, or if you store your products in FBA or WFS fulfillment centers and want to receive the most recent quantity updates.
Channel Warehouse
Sellercloud provides you with three distinct channel warehouse configurations: Set a Channel Warehouse, Restrict Inventory Usage, and Inventory Percentage per Channel.
- When you only Set a Channel Warehouse, orders for this channel will choose the selected location as the ShipFrom warehouse automatically and use it to deduct inventory for the ordered products.
- If Restrict Inventory Usage is enabled, only the selected warehouse’s inventory will be sent to the channel.
- If you enter an Inventory Percent, the restricted warehouse will send only a specified percentage amount from the current warehouse quantity, instead of the total warehouse quantity.
Set a Channel Warehouse
When you select a Channel Warehouse, all orders from that channel will use the chosen location as the Ship From Warehouse instead. To do that:
- Go to Company Settings > Toolbox > Channel Warehouse.
- Click Edit and select your desired location from the Warehouse dropdown menu.
- Click Save.
Restrict Inventory Usage
By default, inventory in sellable warehouses is available for all channels. If you enable the Restrict Inventory Usage checkbox, the chosen warehouse becomes the exclusive source for inventory sent to the respective channel.
To Restrict Inventory Usage:
- On the Channel Warehouse page, locate the desired channel.
- Select a warehouse and enable the Restrict Inventory Usage checkbox in the grid.
If you have Shadow SKUs with different quantities in a channel warehouse with Restrict Inventory Usage enabled, Sellercloud will send the total inventory of the shadow products across all warehouses (see Inventory > Manage Inventory > Open a product > Toolbox > Warehouse) when updating the channel.
Example: The following 3 SKUs are shadows:
- PARENT SKU has a quantity of 5 in Warehouse A
- SHADOW SKU 1 has a quantity of 10 in Warehouse B
- SHADOW SKU 2 has a quantity of 20 in Warehouse C
Sellercloud will send 35 to the channel.
Replenishable products will always show a fixed quantity because they ignore the actual available quantity.
Inventory Percentage per Channel
With the Inventory Percentage option enabled, the restricted warehouse won’t use its entire inventory for the channel. Instead, it sends only the specified percentage from the current warehouse quantity. You can send different inventory levels to different channels based on varying percentages to prevent overselling, and instead of a specific safety quantity number (such as 5 units for all products), the amount will depend on the total quantity available:
- Example 1: The product has 100 units available, and you set Amazon to 70% – Sellercloud will send 70 to Amazon
- Example 2: The product has 10 units available, and you set Amazon to 70% – Sellercloud will send 7 to Amazon.
- Example 3: The product has only 3 units available, and you set Amazon to 50% – Sellercloud will send 1 to Amazon. The amount sent will always round down when using percentages.
To set an Inventory Percent:
- On the Channel Warehouse page, there is a field beside each channel called Inventory Percent. The default is 100%.
- Adjust the percentage to reflect the amount of inventory you want Sellercloud to send to the channel.
This method can help reduce the need for basic custom inventory calculations.
Channel Warehouse
The Channel Warehouse page is accessed from your company’s Toolbox > Channel Warehouse:
These settings let you set a specific warehouse for each channel, which has a number of impacts as outlined below:
- If no warehouse is selected, inventory is deducted from the Default Warehouse (in Client Settings) even if there are no available quantities.
- When a warehouse is set on a channel, the ShipFrom warehouse on all the channel’s orders will default to this warehouse. Typically, all orders have a ShipFrom warehouse of your default warehouse. Quantity will always deduct from the ShipFrom warehouse regardless of its current quantity.
Other settings and customizations, such as post-order plugins, may affect the ShipFrom warehouse set on an order.
- Restrict Inventory Usage box means the selected warehouse will be the only warehouse whose inventory is sent to the channel. Learn more about restricting inventory to a specific warehouse for a given channel.
- Inventory Percent column is enabled by the Client Setting Enable Channel Inventory by percentage. This can be used to determine how much of inventory in this warehouse is sent to the channel, a useful tool for preventing overselling. For more information on it, refer to the section below.
- To have FBA inventory imported into Sellercloud for your company, set the FBA Warehouse for the FBA channel on this page. Learn more about FBA inventory.
Inventory Percentage per Channel
You can send different inventory levels to different channels based on varying percentages per channel. So, instead of a specific number safety quantity (such as 5 units for all products), the amounts depend on the quantity available:
- Example 1: Product has 100 units available and you set Amazon to 70% – Sellercloud will send 70 to Amazon, not the other 30 units.
- Example 2: Product has 10 units available and you set Amazon to 70% – Sellercloud will send 7 to Amazon, not the other 3 units.
- Example 3: Product has only 3 units available and you set Amazon to 50% – Sellercloud will send 1 to Amazon, not the other 2 units (or an impossible 1.5 units). The amount sent will always round down when using percentages; in this example, to 50% of 2 units.
- Select the client setting Enable Channel inventory by percentage.
- Go to Settings > Company > Toolbox > Channel Warehouse and see the field beside each channel called Inventory Percent. The default is 100%.
- Update it to another percentage to reflect the amount of the inventory you want Sellercloud to send to the channel. This could reduce the need for basic custom inventory calculations.
Limit Available Inventory to Specific Warehouse
By default, inventory in a sellable warehouse will be available for all channels. However, you can restrict inventory to a specific warehouse for a given channel.
Example:
- SKU123 has an inventory quantity of 20 in Warehouse A and a quantity of 5 in Warehouse B:
- Available inventory sent to Amazon can be restricted to 20 = inventory quantity in Warehouse A, while
- Available inventory for eBay can be restricted to 5 = inventory quantity in Warehouse B
Once this is done, the available inventory for the channel shown on the channel page will be restricted to that warehouse. Orders from that channel will deduct from the selected warehouse, and inventory feeds will be sent from that warehouse.
In image #1 below, product B002G9UGT8 has an available quantity of 10 across all sellable warehouses. However, 0 are available in the eCommerce NJ warehouse, as set in image #2.
As shown in image #2 below, by choosing the Ecommerce NJ warehouse in the company’s Channel Warehouse page and clicking the Restrict Inventory Usage box, the available inventory for eBay will be 0, as shown in the red box in image 1.
If the inventory was not restricted, the quantity in the red box would have been 2 because the fixed price listing quantity is 2.
Products that are replenishable will always show the fixed quantity because they ignore the actual available quantity.
- Navigate Company Settings > Toolbox > Channel Warehouse.
- Locate the channel to which you want to restrict inventory.
- Select a warehouse.
- Enable the Restrict Inventory Usage option.