Tracking your inventory available for sale is important, as you don't want a customer to purchase something online when your item is sold out, but you also don't want inventory to spoil on your shelves if customers don't see it available online. Additionally, we know that not all of your inventory of an item may be for sale to customers; you might have some of your harvest allocated to existing orders, recurring customers, or use around your farm operation. Because of this, you can control the amount of a product available for online sales separately from your inventory for that item.
You'll add the overall inventory you have on hand within the inventory section of your Resources tab. You can get started with that process here, and explore that section of the Help Center to learn all the details. Regardless of if it's for sale in your online store, you can track and use your inventory in this section.
You can separately track the amount you have for sale in your online store from the products you have set up in your Market. Within each product, you'll find a field to supply the amount available for online sales. In the video example below, you can see that we have 35.5 gallons of milk for sale online, but when we view our overall inventory, we have 70.5 gallons available. The difference might be attributed to milk we use to feed our calves, or recurring weekly orders that we need to fulfill. After putting those aside, it leaves us with the surplus to sell in our market.
It's easy enough to update the quantity for sale online within the product whenever you need to. You can simply navigate to Market>Products, select your product, and change the amount available for sale. Be sure to save after you make the changes. We added an additional 4.5 gallons for sale in our example just by changing the amount to 40.
Be aware that you are also able to do this as you record a yield from an animal or harvest from a crop. As we milk the cow in the example below, we add the 6.5 gallons of milk to our inventory, and since we already have a surplus, we can mark the box to "update linked product inventory" and update the quantity for sale online as well. Note that for this to be available your inventory item must be linked to your market product.
Your customers will see this amount available when they view the product in your online store. Once the amount available for sale is sold and there are zero remaining, the product will be set to sold out and not available for sale. However, be aware that you can still sell it by adding a manual order through your Farmbrite system, in case you anticipate a harvest and want to get the order added in advance.
If you still have questions on how you can distinguish these types of inventories, feel free to reach out, we're glad to help!