How inventory planning works
Inventory planning reads your Shopify stock and sales and tells you, for every variant, whether to reorder, how many to buy, and whether you're holding too much. It's under Inventory in the dashboard and comes with every store.
The pages
- Overview
- Inventory at cost, weeks of supply, how many variants to reorder, overstock and stale stock, and a Needs attention list.
- Stock
- Every variant with available and incoming stock, recent sales and status. Filter by product, SKU, vendor, type or status.
- Buy list
- What to reorder and how many. See Buy list.
- Overstock
- Stock that will take too long to sell, or hasn't sold. See Overstock and stale stock.
- Rules
- Variants and products you've marked Never reorder.
- Settings
- Lead times and stock targets. See Planning settings.
- Data
- The feeds behind planning. See Inventory data.
Sales per week
Each variant's sales rate blends two windows: the last 4 weeks and the last 13 weeks. By default the last 4 weeks count for 60%, so a trend shows up quickly without one unusual week taking over. Products newer than the window use their own age instead.
Sales count as demand. Refunds and returns aren't subtracted, because the shopper still wanted the product. Cancelled orders and removed line items don't count.
Supply
Supply is the stock available at the locations you count, plus Shopify's incoming stock (from transfers and purchase orders) when Count Shopify's incoming stock as already ordered is on.
When to reorder, and how many
Reorder when supply ≤ sales per week × (lead time + safety stock)
Buy enough to reach sales per week × (lead time + safety stock + cover)
Lead time is how long an order takes to arrive. Safety stock is a buffer for a busier-than-usual week. Cover is how many weeks the new stock should last once it arrives.
A variant that sells 6 a week, with a 6-week lead time and 2 weeks of safety stock, should be reordered once supply drops to 48. With 8 weeks of cover, the target is 96, so with 30 on hand Relvello suggests buying 66.
Statuses
- Out of stock
- Nothing available to sell.
- Reorder
- Supply is at or below the reorder point.
- Watch
- Available stock is at the reorder point, but incoming stock covers it.
- Healthy
- Enough supply, and selling.
- Overstock
- Weeks of supply are above your overstock setting.
- Stale
- In stock, no sale within the stale window, and the product is older than that window.
- No stock, no sales
- Nothing to plan.