Product Inventory Management
Inventory is a required field for standard products and shares. The inventory is automatically adjusted down when a product is sold or up when an order is canceled. You set the original inventory when you're creating the product/share, but you can change it at any time.
Inventory Management
The three options for product inventory management are:
- Manage Stock Globally: Best for products where you have a standard unit, like pounds or bunches or pints. All products are either sold in one option (like one bunch) or in multiples of the standard unit, like 1 lb bags or 5 lb bags. If you have selected Manage Stock Globally, the buying options are linked to the units of your inventory. For example, if you have 200 lbs of tomatoes total and two buying options, 2-lb bag or 5-lb bag, GrownBy will adjust inventory down by 5 lb if someone orders a 5-lb bag. This article covers the details of managing stock Globally.
- Not manage stock Globally: in this option, each buying option has its own stock. This is great for cuts of meat or cheese that might vary in weights. Read all about Selling Meat or Cheese here.
- Ignore inventory totally on GrownBy: If you don’t wish to manage stock within GrownBy, you can always enter a high number into the In Stock field when you are adding your products. That way, the system will always have your products available.
Managing Stock Globally
When you are editing a product, there is a checkbox under Units that turns off and on the option for your stock to be inclusive of your buying options. It looks like this:
If you have selected Manage Stock Globally, the buying options are linked to the units of your inventory. For example, if you have 200 lbs of tomatoes total and two buying options, 2-lb bag or 5-lb bag, GrownBy will adjust inventory down by 5 lb if someone orders a 5-lb bag.
If a product/share has zero inventory, it still shows up in your shop, but cannot be purchased and it'll have an 'out of stock' icon on the image, like this:
You will receive an email when your stock in any particular product is at five or fewer items. You can always manually hide products if you don't want to show the out of stock items in your shop.
The best way to update your product inventories is to put your Products page into the list view (it should be in this view by default), click the blue number under the 'In Stock' heading, update the stock, then click the green checkmark to confirm the change.
Managing Stock per Unit
If you deselect the "Manage Stock Globally" box, you will be able to set your stock per buying option. This is useful if you need a more granular approach to stock management or, for example, if you have products in set units that cannot be divided such as salsa in half pints, pints, and quarts. This is covered in more detail as it pertains to selling meat and cheese in this article.
Inventory and Custom Shares
If you are running a Custom CSA in GrownBy, adjusting your inventory numbers before the open of customization each distribution is crucial to the system knowing what you have.
All products that you are offering for your Custom CSA customers must be in the CSA Group that the Custom Share is associated with. Those products may also be available for general purchase in your shop but keep in mind that the inventory is one and the same. Any a la carte ordering of these products will reduce what is available for your custom CSA members once their customization window opens.
All products that you are offering for your Custom CSA customers must be in the CSA Group that the Custom Share is associated with. Those products may also be available for general purchase in your shop but keep in mind that the inventory is one and the same. Any a la carte ordering of these products will reduce what is available for your custom CSA members once their customization window opens.
To control whether the public is able to purchase products which are also available to your Custom CSA, use the "Only buy on CSA pages" toggle and make your CSA Group Private. If the CSA Group is Private and the "Only buy on CSA pages" toggle is turned on, the public will not see or be able to purchase those products without the link:
Private CSA Groups can only be accessed via the link which appears in the Actions menu once you make them Private:
The "Only buy on CSA pages" setting can be found in the Product Editing screen or can be bulk edited on the Products screen to apply to all products you wish to manage separately for your Custom CSA:
Still have questions? We have answers. Email GrownBy support directly at support@grownby.app, or schedule a one-on-one call with one of our team members. A real human with farming experience will get back to you as soon as possible!
Related Articles
Create an EBT/SNAP-Eligible Product
If you are not yet certified to accept SNAP Online, please read this article to learn about the certification process and to get started! Your SNAP/EBT customers will only be able to purchase products with their SNAP card that that are listed as ...Importing Products Into GrownBy From Other Software
Importing products into GrownBy from another sales platform We have received many requests to import products into GrownBy, and we are happy to assist you with this task. As a note, we generally do not recommend importing customer lists to GrownBy as ...Share Templates
How to use share templates Share templates are a way to group together similar types of shares for CSA farmers. They allow you to offer a variety of shares but streamline how shares appear in reports. Templates must be created BEFORE creating the ...All about Standard Products
Types of products in GrownBy In GrownBy, there are three types of Products: Standard: A product in your shop that is available as a stand-alone item. While Standard products can be ordered for multiple dates simultaneously, they are not a ...How Customized Shares Work in GrownBy
Custom Shares New for 2024-2025, GrownBy offers customizable shares for shoppers. For a quick overview of customizable shares, take a look at our FAQ. The following article dives deeper into customizable shares and how to set them up. If you plan to ...