Configuring inventory reporting flows in Pipe17

Many integrations support pushing inventory records out of Pipe17. Pipe17 allows you to configure inventory reporting flows with great flexibility. This article covers general concepts around pushing inventory out to e-commerce and ERP systems with some example scenarios.

Overview

Configuration of inventory reporting flows is largely managed through two features: location settings and integration settings. By configuring these settings, Pipe17 can allow you to customize how to push inventory out to the external integrations, including:

1. Sending out inventory counts as a total across multiple locations
2. Sending out inventory counts as individual records for each location
3. Excluding locations from inventory totals calculations as a whole
4. Excluding locations from inventory totals calculations for specific integrations

Examples

One-to-one relationship between e-commerce and fulfillment locations

Let's say you have a fulfillment location B that stores inventory information for e-commerce location A. To configure Pipe17 to push inventory from B to A, you can merge A to B.

Push inventory totals

By default, when pushing inventory totals, inventory across all locations will be pushed. If you wish to exclude locations from this calculation, you can either:

1. Enable "Exclude from Totals" to exclude the location from all inventory totals calculations
2. Add the integration to "Exclude from totals by integration" to exclude the location from inventory totals for that integration.

You can preview how inventory totals will be sent by going to Inventory -> All Inventory -> set "Simulate totals for" (For more information, see Inventory Table Quick Filters).

Advanced Examples

One store of inventory records in the e-commerce system

Connectors like Amazon Seller Central has one record that tracks inventory counts for all SKUs. Let's say that you have locations with inventory A, B, and C. Since C is only used to track POS inventory, we only want to push inventory for A and B to Amazon Seller Central. In this case, we can exclude C from totals calculations when pushing inventory totals to Amazon Seller Central. 

In the integration settings for Amazon Seller Central, we can leave the "Define source location for inventory updates" field blank. By leaving it blank, Pipe17 will default to pushing inventory totals to Amazon Seller Central.

This "Exclude from totals by integration" field can be useful when configuring pushing inventory totals to multiple integrations (e.g. you have a record-keeping ERP that needs the total of A, B, and C and a marketplace integration that needs the sellable total of A and B).

E-commerce inventory records mapped to multiple fulfillment locations

Let's say you have 4 fulfillment locations, New York, Boston, Seattle, and Los Angeles. In your e-commerce system (E-commerce 1), you have locations West Coast and East Coast. You want West Coast to track inventory totals for Seattle and Los Angeles, and East Coast to track inventory totals for New York and Boston. To support this, we will do the following:

1. Duplicate your e-commerce integration (E-commerce 2). This integration will only handle pushing inventory, so enable the "Push inventory" setting. Configure E-commerce 1 to point to the West Coast location, and E-commerce 2 to point to the East Coast location.
2. In New York and Boston, add E-commerce 1 to the inventory total exclusion list so that they are excluded when E-commerce 1 is calculating inventory totals.
3. Similarly, in Seattle and Los Angeles, add E-commerce 2 to the inventory total exclusion list.