So how do you manage your inventory?

I use a PC-based cart right now. I create and retire about 500 products a month. I add them in Quickbooks, and transfer from there to the cart software (then upload to my server). When I receive orders, I receive inventory into Quickbooks, then update the inventory automatically into the cart.

I'd like to move away from the solution I have now. But... how do you all manage your inventory? I can not imagine receiving inventory in Quickbooks for many products, then manually adjusting the inventory one product at a time in Zen-Cart.

Am I just missing the obvious? This lack of two-way interface with Quickbooks has just really been a show stopper for me, and kept me on my existing system. Maybe I'm just not thinking outside the box.

So how do you do it?

You could just not keep inventory in Zen and just do it in QB. Set quantity to 0 if out of stock. If in stock, set to 1. There is a feature that you can set, that zen will not deduct inventory. So it would always stay on 1 unless you change it manually. This is what I do anyway.

Have you looked into Easy Populate?

This is what I use, you can export all your inventory to EXCEL, update INVENTORY & upload it back to Zen. You can also RETIRE or DELETE products as they become unavailable, this is what I use to manage an inventory of over 37,000 products.

For me, I run the same stocks on both ebay and my website. I use turbo lister to copy the data into excel.

I do it like this:

="UPDATE products SET products_quantity = "&D2&" WHERE products_model = '"&B2&"';"

B2 is populated by a full list of product codes that are used on ebay.
D2 is populated with this: =IF(ISNA(C2),0,C2)
C2, is where the vlookup populates. If an item doesn't exist, d2 is automatically populated with 0

Then at the end, I use:
UPDATE products SET products_status = 1 WHERE products_quantity>0;
UPDATE products SET products_status = 0 WHERE products_quantity<=0;

To switch off all products which are out of stock and switch on when there is stock.

Maybe not the best solution in the world, but it works for me.

Thanks. This is all very helpful. I sent an email to Easy Populate a few days ago to see if they could do what I needed, but I haven't heard back. It sounds like maybe this will work for me.

I need more than in stock / out of stock on my site. I sell inexpensive products, but in large quantities, frequent purchases. If I don't have the actual stock count, I will definitely over-sell. I typically don't restock, so I want to do all I can to prevent over-sells.

pharry, seems you are set up pretty well with the solution you currently have. If you can now set up new items in QB then automatically send them to your cart, seems pretty smooth to me. Why change?

To do the same, you need to buy commercial modules, middleware or have them custom made.

Maybe this would help...

cptok posted: There are a few "middleware" products which will do exactly that. They are not free, and it introduces a new middleware application to maintain. Look into Atandra's "T-Hub" and Webgility. They both might do what you are looking for - and both support QB POS up to version 8.0 with Zen Cart.

Why change? I'm selling more and more digi products, and I simply don't have enough space on my PC. If I delete them from the PC, the software also removes them from the server. My solution does not support gift certificates, which I really need. It doesn't support an interface to USPS shipping rates, but does to UPS. I also need USPS. And user accounts must be setup and maintained by me, not the customer. A huge pain. Those are the main driving forces behind a change. There are others, but those are the ones I care about the most.

I'll go look at the two applications you referenced. Thank you!

The suggestion with Easy Populate might work for you. Question is, do you have to have it fully integrated with QB? You can populate lots of products with EP but this would not have anything to do with your QB items, you would have to import your items into QB separately. But as you probably know, this can be done from a spread sheet as well. So it might just be a two step process to set up new items. Anyway, nothing is perfect out of the box.