Tracking stock for products with options

Inventory tracking helps keep your stock levels accurate so that customers don’t buy more items than you currently have. It also lets you know when it’s time to replenish stock and allows you to opt into accepting pre-orders for out of stock items.

If you sell products that slightly differ from each other, for example, by color or size, you can add them to your catalog as one base product with Color and Size options. To track stock levels of these product options automatically, you have to create variations out of them (Red Small, Red Medium, Red Large; White M, White L, White XXL, etc). Every variation needs to have its own SKU and stock quantity for inventory purposes.

Enabling inventory tracking for variations

After you add products with options like size and color, you can track the stock level of every product variant if you create variations out of options. A product variation is a combination of product options, for example, Red Small or Yellow Large.

Every newly created variation inherits SKU and quantity properties (as well as price, weight, image, etc.) from the product it belongs to. To track the stock level of a certain variation, you should set a unique SKU and quantity in stock for it.

When a particular variation becomes out of stock, you can either choose to display it on the storefront with a Sold Out label and a disabled “Add to Bag” button, or you can opt into accepting pre-orders for this variation. You can also set up low-stock notifications to replenish the stock on time.

To enable stock tracking for a product variation:

That’s it, now your store tracks stock levels of product variations. When buyers place orders (with Awaiting Payment or Paid payment status) for a product variation, its stock gets reduced for the number of items ordered. When the variation stock reaches zero, it either gets a Sold Out label and becomes unavailable for purchase until its stock is replenished or, in case you enable pre-orders for this product variation, it gets a Pre-order label, and customers can order it in advance.

If you cancel or refund the order, the quantity of the variations in that order will be automatically returned to the stock of those variations in your online store.

Once you set a unique SKU and stock for a product variation, the base product stock is no longer reduced when someone buys this particular variation. It’s the individual variations’ stock that now gets reduced.

Setting up low-stock alerts for variations

You can set low-stock email notifications to be informed when this or that variation is about to run out of stock:

When you replenish the stock of a variation (produce more of such a product variation or order and receive it from a supplier), you can click Re-stock product button in such email to visit the product editing page and update the quantity in stock number for that variation in your store.

To receive low stock notifications to your inbox, you should specify the variation’s quantity when you should be alerted.

To set low stock notifications for a variation:

Now, when the stock of the variation reaches that low-stock quantity, you will be alerted by a special email notification.

Make sure to enable the Low stock notification in the Settings → Notifications page in your Ecwid admin. In the Admin email addresses block there, you can also change the email address that notifications should be sent to or add several email addresses (e.g., yours and an email address of a person who manages your inventory). Please note that this address is used for all your admin notifications, and not only for the “Low stock” notification.

If you do not set any low stock quantity for a variation that you track inventory for, a low-stock notification will be sent as soon as the variation stock reaches "1".

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