What is the best way to handle a multi-warehouse setup with Big Commerce


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We have a client with multiple locations/warehouses.  They use Big Commerce as a B2B site where the customer needs to be setup first.  They are running into a couple issues I could use some guidance.

  1. Is there a way to display inventory availability by warehouse instead of just one specific warehouse or all warehouses?
  2. When a customer places an order the customer needs to have the all the items on the sales order assigned to the customer default warehouse, but it appears the integration changes the sales order line warehouse depending on availability.  Is there anyway to force the sale order line warehouse to be assigned to the customer warehouse only?

Currently the client is on 20R1, but we are looking to upgrade them to 20R2.

Thanks,

Kurt


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We have two warehouses.  We have set up Acumatica to show only one warehouse on the Big Commerce B2B website.  If we did not, then products from both warehouses would show up.  This was a simple setting in Acumatica.

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Hi @KurtBauer 

Is there a way to display inventory availability by warehouse instead of just one specific warehouse or all warehouses?

Do you mean availability in BigCommerce or in Acumatica?
If you ask about bigCommerce, than you can use Warehouse settings in BigCommerce Stores. There you can specify multiple warehouses and warehouse locations to export to BigCommerce

When a customer places an order the customer needs to have the all the items on the sales order assigned to the customer default warehouse, but it appears the integration changes the sales order line warehouse depending on availability.

Currently we take default warehouse from Inventory Item, as we don’t know from bigCommerce what warehouse to take.

Is there anyway to force the sale order line warehouse to be assigned to the customer warehouse only?

Do you store warehouse on customer profile?
I think the easiest way to customize it in the connector to set the warehouse. Mapping will not work, as you need it depending on the customer.

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Sorry I wasn’t real clear in my original post.  The client has customers across the US that are assigned to specific warehouse in the customer location.  For example, Customer1 is assigned to Florida and Customer2 is assigned to California.  Each warehouse maintains it’s own inventory and if a customer orders from another warehouse they can be charged a delivery fee.

Their questions are:

  1. Is there anyway to show inventory availability in Big Commerce by warehouse?  So each customer would see inventory separately for Florida and California.
  2. Is there anyway to force the sales order line warehouse to only use the customer locaiton warehouse?  Right now when a customer places an order in Big Commerce if there is no inventory in the customers default warehouse the sales order line warehouse will list the other warehouse.  For example, if Customer1 orders an item that is not in stock in Florida the sales order will assign California as the warehouse.  

Thanks,

Kurt

Userlevel 7
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Hi Kurt

Is there anyway to show inventory availability in Big Commerce by warehouse?  So each customer would see inventory separately for Florida and California.

So far I know, BigCommerce does not have any inventory locations.

Is there anyway to force the sales order line warehouse to only use the customer locaiton warehouse? Right now when a customer places an order in Big Commerce if there is no inventory in the customers default warehouse the sales order line warehouse will list the other warehouse.  For example, if Customer1 orders an item that is not in stock in Florida the sales order will assign California as the warehouse.  

Since bigCommerce does not have any locations, there is not easy way to add it in the product. However if you know that all customers from Florida, will go to the warehouse A, you can write a customization that will choose warehouse A when State == ‘Florida’

Hope it helps.

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I don’t know how much inventory changes, but you could have a customization that puts inventory into attributes of each item per location.  Those could then sync with BigCommerce as item custom fields.  If you used customer class to separate customers by location, you could also customize BigCommerce to highlight certain location based on that class.  We have certain customers that are actually internal users and we use a customer class customization to change what they see.  

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@RyanBrownXBYTE We had proposed the same solution, but with over 20,000 items across 6 locations the performance would be severely impacted because the client needs live availability information on the website.  Thanks for the suggestion! 

Kurt

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Another tool to look at is skyvia. It can link directly to the BC database and may help with performance. I have never hooked it directly to Acumatica (only CSV), but it could work. 
 

You could also look at live connection to Acumatica from BC or pushing Acumatica data to a VPS and then a live connection to that from BC.

 

just throwing some extra stuff out there in case it helps or makes you think of a new solution.  
 

 

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The skyvia tool looks interesting.  I’m thinking I could create an Acumatica oData feed using INSiteStatus for live inventory by warehouse and then have skyvia update the BigCommerce custom fields using that feed and the last modified date. 

Thanks again.

Kurt

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No problem - I searched for a while to find that tool.  It is also great to update selective inventory.  We have issues trying to do an import using the BC tools and the category field.  

 

I am part of a panel talking about BC and Acumatica today at noon ET (https://www.augforums.com/live/).  You are welcome to join and ask questions or share your experiences.  It will also be recorded in case you want to view later.

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@josh.fischer - During our last discussion with BigCommerce, you had mentioned that something is in the works regarding multi-warehouse inventory on the BigCommerce side. Any updates on this?

As a workaround, you had suggested that we can come up with a GI that displays the total inventory available by warehouse and display that information in BigCommerce. Would that be through custom fields in BigCommerce? Are there any Acumatica customers that have implemented this solution?

Thanks!

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This got talked about on our AUGForums.com Live broadcast from May 20 as Ryan mentioned above:

 

Here’s @josh.fischer talking about multiple warehouses with BigCommerce:

Click here to watch Josh

 

And here’s @RyanBrownXBYTE talking about the Skyvia.com tool:

Click here to watch Ryan

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@josh.fischer mentions a 3rd party integration from Randem.  It appears this might be their BOAPIS or Click & Collect.  Is this correct?  Can anyone provide any more information?  It appears Randem has 2 websites based on the number of locations needed.

RANDEM Retail | Click & Collect / BOPIS

BigCommerce - Click & collect / BOPIS - RANDEM Retail (randemgroup.com)

Thanks,

Kurt

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@KurtBauer @josh.fischer - the web agency we worked with made a GI in Acumatica to extract the Quantity Available to Ship (QtyHardAvail) and use push notifications in Acumatica to push those values into BigCommerce as they update over the course of the day. 

If you’re still dealing with this challenge, I can put you in touch with them. 

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@MichaelTobi - I’ve been following this thread and curious to learn more about how you solved this challenge. Are you utilizing RANDEM with the QtyHardAvail GI to update BigCommerce current stock level? QtyHardAvail for multiple warehouses or warehouse locations? Our business acquired a major competitor and I’m exploring the ‘maintain separate ecom sites’ vs ‘single site with multi warehouse’ approaches. Ultimately just consolidating inventory into a single stock value on BigCommerce has quite a few drawbacks compared to warehouse specific stock values, though it seems like that is the only ‘native’ solution at this time (assuming you find ways to deal with routing orders, properly quoting shipping, etc). 

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@Phil , the way we solved this was by creating a specific generic inquiry that lists 4 columns: SKU, warehouse 1, warehouse 2, warehouse 3. We then leveraged the push notifications function in Acumatica to push specific data points out to our BigCommerce website and mapped to custom fields that are present for each SKU in BigCommerce. It’s not a perfect solution as some quantity updates are being missed throughout the day due to the size of the push notifications which are being rejected by the server that’s handling the transmission of the data. You can PM me and I can put you in touch with the company that took care of our BigCommerce set up. They set up the whole push notifications process for us. 

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