Inventory/Warehouse management?

[dugawug]

I'm curious if ZenCart has any contributed module that allows someone to manage multiple warehouses and especially to keep track of what inventory is in each warehouse?

OSCommerce apparently has something that will do it called QTPro, but so far as I've read, I'd like to use Zen Cart instead. (did that rhyme?)

[dugawug]

ok, no reply, but let me complicate my question further

is there a way to:

1. manage multiple warehouses and designate what products are at what warehouse?

2. manage product distributors and designate what distributors are the source for each product?

neither seems to be there by default in the admin and so far, i'm not seeing a community module for either.

[stagebrace]

Have QTPro converted to ZenCart?

[dugawug]

Have QTPro converted to ZenCart?

excellent idea!

but...uh....how is that possible?

[dugawug]

backing up a bit, i don't even think QTPro for osCommerce does this!! reading the manual now and don't see how it even relates!
(bad advice from the osCommerce forum)


in any case, i'm surprised no one seems to need multiple warehouse support and a way to keep track of distributors/wholesalers.

[quentinjs]

Its a neat idea. I had a couple customers years ago that we did implementations for that had multiple warehouses. Alas it was done with ASP/SQL Server and another implementation was Java/Oracle.

For many users I think ZenCart and OSC are more for single warehouses, mom & pop businesses and those people who throw out a few products in hopes of making a quick buck. I think ZenCart is definetily not a product that is limited to just small businesses, but right now the Core ZenCart team is more devoted to improving the core product.

Now someone may have already written a module for warehousing, but I am thinking that this would take a bit of work to implement as products aren't tied to a "zone" so something like that would have to be integrated into all the product queries.

One way would be to add a prefix or suffix to each product for each distributer/warehouse. Another could be using the catalog with copies of the same product in each. This is a bit of a hack, but would work. Another approach may be to use the "product types" but I don't know if that would help either.

Other approaches as I said would take coding changes of core catalog and admin files as I don't think (although I could be wrong here) the OBS system can be used for this. Now there are coders who'd be interested in writing these ... but you' have to check our that forum.

Now there are a few extremely knowledgeable people roaming around the site that may be able to add more light to this discussion.