How to track your WooCommerce product stock with Megaventory

Introduction

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If your business relies on the WooCommerce platform, integrating it with Megaventory will bring you superior inventory and order management while keeping your products and clients synced across WooCommerce and Megaventory over multiple physical inventory locations in real-time. The Megaventory Inventory Management extension by Megaventory upgrades your WooCommerce eshop so that you are able to handle orders from your clients more efficiently. Essentially, it syncs incoming WooCommerce orders with Megaventory where you can track which stage they are at (verified, shipped, invoiced, closed). Megaventory tracks inventory levels for your WooCommerce products and syncs that information so that it can be displayed on the eshop’s frontend for your clients’ reference. Similarly, returns can be handled via Megaventory and relevant information can be displayed in your WooCommerce backend for the sake of your clients. Product, client, shipping and other information is synced in real-time across the two services by means of this Megaventory Inventory Management extension.

How can the Megaventory plugin work for you?

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With Megaventory your WooCommerce site can be upgraded in the following ways:

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  • You’ll be able to show in real-time your products’ availability in your WooCommerce frontend based on actual stock levels.
  • You can connect more than one warehouses, stores or other types of locations at your disposal and the stock representation in the WooCommerce frontend will be correct.
  • Once an order arrives in WooCommerce you’ll have the capability to process it properly from verification to shipment to closing in the Megaventory backend ensuring a best-practices approach in running your eshop.
  • A lot of the information in one system is automatically synced to the other as necessary saving you significant time you would otherwise be spending making double entries.
  • Additional functionality such as bundling, returns, etc is also seamlessly handled.

How the plugin works

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The Megaventory Inventory Management extension will create an additional section in your WooCommerce admin panel where you can manage the plugin from. In order to use the Megaventory Inventory Management plugin, it is necessary to enter a few initial settings and perform an initial sync with your Megaventory account (both one-off tasks).

Following a successful sync, you will either access Megaventory to fulfill and manage your orders or login to WooCommerce for the usual functionality. In any case, double entry is eliminated and any relevant information which can be synced is transferred in the background by the plugin.

Example use cases

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Typical use cases of the Megaventory Inventory Management extension are for WooCommerce eshops which have seen significant growth (many orders per day) and need help in tracking the status of each order and the location of its associated products. Managing physical products is the core usefulness of the Megaventory Inventory Management extension (but services are also supported).

Typical examples of using the plugin are either retail or wholesale businesses handling apparel, electronics, hardware, furniture, etc – these are only some of the verticals supported. Businesses needing to track manufacturing are also able to benefit from the production tracking features (which are also applied in scenarios where bundling/kitting products together is necessary).

Account & Pricing

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The Megaventory Inventory Management plugin must be used together with a Megaventory account subscription. After the extension has been installed in WooCommerce, merchants need to sign up for their separate Megaventory account here. The Megaventory account is initially provided as a 15-day free trial and then for a monthly subscription fee – details about the fees are available here.** The Megaventory Pricing is as follows:
  • Pro (5 Users, 10k Transactions, 20 Locations, 20k Products, 20k Clients, 2 Hours Training, 5 Different Integrations): USD 150 / month with + USD 50 / month / extra User (up to 35) and + USD 50 / month / extra 10K Transactions (up to 100K)
  • Enterprise (anything higher than the upper Pro limits): Custom Quote

How to set up the WooCommerce – Megaventory integration

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Requirements

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Before starting the process of integration make sure the following requirements are met:
Make sure all the WooCommerce products have an SKU and a short description. Products without an SKU and a short description will be ignored by the plugin.
The plugin treats two products with the same SKU as the same product. If there are any different products with matching SKUs, their details will be overwritten. Before starting the process please ensure that all different products have unique SKUs.
All product variations need unique SKUs to be correctly synchronized with Megaventory. These SKUs must be different from each other and the SKU of the base product.
Make sure there are no taxes with the same name and rate (allowed in WooCommerce, but not in Megaventory). When the plugin is active it prevents users from editing names and rates. If you want to make any changes, do them before starting integration.
Make sure there are no coupons with the same name (allowed in WooCommerce, complicated in Megaventory) as this may cause synchronization problems afterwards.

Setting things up

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If you have already set up WooCommerce, start from step 3.
  1. Set up a WordPress website.
  2. Download the WooCommerce extension from WordPress plugin store, add it to your website (wordpress.org/plugins/woocommerce) and activate it.
  3. Add the Megaventory plugin to your website.
  4. Go to the Plugins page in your WordPress website.
  5. Press Add New button. If you don’t have the zip file go to step f.
6. Press Upload Plugin.
7. Press Choose File, find Megaventory-Wordpress.zip and press Install Now.
8. Following a successful installation, press Activate Plugin. Go to step i.
9. Search Megaventory.
10. Press Install. 11. Press Activate. 12. You should be redirected to the Plugins page and see the following message:
13. Log in to your Megaventory account as an administrator.
14. Go to My Profile.
15. Go to Account Integrations and enable the WooCommerce integration.
16. Click Save.
17. Again, go to My Profile and generate API Key by clicking the blue key.
18. The API Key field should now contain a sequence of letters, numbers and the ‘@’ sign. Copy it to the clipboard and press Update to save changes.
19 .Go back to your WordPress account and open the settings of the Megaventory plugin.
20. Paste your API Key into the Megaventory API Key field and confirm by clicking on Update.
21. The following error may appear:
22. This error does not appear if the main Megaventory currency and the WooCommerce currency are the same. If the above error does not appear, skip to step 24.
23. To resolve the previous error go to the WooCommerce settings:
24. In Currency options choose the one corresponding to the primary currency in your Megaventory account.
25.  To check what your main currency in Megaventory is, go to Settings and choose Currencies.
26. Now you should see this message:
Go to the Megaventory plugin and press Initialize. This may take a few minutes depending on the number of records in Megaventory and WooCommerce. Do not interrupt this process. If the process is interrupted, repeat this step until it succeeds.

Initialization Results

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The initialization process accomplishes the following:
  1. Finds matching products in WooCommerce and Megaventory (based on SKU) and associates them as the same product
  2. Finds matching clients in WooCommerce and Megaventory (based on their name and email) and associates them as the same person/account.
  3. Associates matching taxes between Megaventory and WooCommerce (the ones with the same name and rate) and creates new taxes in Megaventory if needed.
  4. Creates a guest client in Megaventory which will be assigned all orders made by clients without an account

This step does not create any new product or clients but enables synchronization for products and clients that already exist in both Megaventory and WooCommerce.

What key entities are synchronized between WooCommerce and Megaventory?

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Order (WooCommerce) – Sales Order (Megaventory)

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Orders are subject to continuous synchronization, which means that every time an order is placed in WooCommerce it is mirrored in Megaventory (as a Sales Order). Every order is placed with the primary currency and added to Megaventory when it is finalized, regardless of payment type.
All WooCommerce orders which are placed by anonymous users (those who do not make an account) are attributed to Guest Client in Megaventory.
Every order stores the following information:
  • reference to client account
  • order number
  • comment
  • currency
  • billing address
  • SKUs and quantities
  • prices*
  • taxes**
  • discount**
* WooCommerce stores 2 kinds of prices – usual and a sale one. Megaventory is capable of storing only one at a time (default), thus every order put in Megaventory contains final, relevant price for every single product determined on WooCommerce side.
** Both taxes and discounts are simplified in Megaventory system. See the relevant chapters for more information.

Products (WooCommerce, Megaventory)

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Products are subject to continuous synchronization. Products sync from WooCommerce to Megaventory only. Every product stores:
  • SKU,
  • Image (or image url),
  • stock,
  • price(s),
  • short and long description,
  • size and dimensions,
  • category(s).
When a product is created in WooCommerce, the plugin looks for a duplicate with the same SKU in Megaventory and links them together. If the product is not found, then it is firstly created using details provided in WooCommerce interface. If a product with the same SKUs but different details is found in Megaventory, those details are overridden!
Continuous synchronization from Megaventory to WooCommerce occurs only for linked products and affects stock levels and product details. Any new products created in Megaventory are not synced to WooCommerce.
Every product added to WooCommerce must also meet Megaventory requirements to be successfully synchronized. Their requirements include:
  • SKU is present, max 100 characters.
  • Short description is present, max 400 characters.
  • Long description is not longer than 400 characters.

Categories

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Categories are created if needed, when creating or updating products. WooCommerce’s products may have many categories, but no category is more important than other categories. Megaventory only assigns one category per product. During synchronization Megaventory chooses a category (the first category in alphabetic order) to associate the product with.

Taxes

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During initial synchronization, the plugin tries to find the Megaventory and WooCommerce taxes with the same name and rate and will treat them as the same entity. Having many WooCommerce taxes with same names and rates may cause problems.
Afterwards, during the continuous synchronization, creating or updating taxes in Megaventory will be ignored by the plugin. The continuous synchronization only happens from WooCommerce to Megaventory. New taxes created in WooCommerce are also created in Megaventory.
When the plugin is active, it prevents users from editing Taxes in WooCommerce . If you need to change a tax, the best practice is to delete it and create a new one.
Megaventory only applies one tax per product. In case more than one tax applies to a product in a WooCommerce order, Megaventory will create a new compound tax with a rate corresponding to the rate of the taxes applied to the given product.
Please note that sometimes when making changes to Taxes in WooCommerce, the system may look like it is stuck. In such case, just refresh the page. All changes will be applied correctly.

Coupons

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A Coupon in WooCommerce is a very developed and customizable entity. Due to differences between systems, some special cases are not be mapped directly into Megaventory. To allow for the full of WooCommerce’s functionality alternative methods are available for achieving the same effect.
  1. Coupons in WooCommerce deduct either a fixed amount or a percentage of the total of the order. This is recreated in Megaventory as follows:
  • Percentage coupons are placed in Megaventory as Discounts.
  • Fixed coupons are applied directly in product price in a sales order, and they are mentioned in tags.
   2. Coupons in WooCommerce can be combined (i.e. more than one coupon can be applied to the same order and their rates will be summed). This is recreated in Megaventory with the use of compound discounts – the plugin creates a new discount in Megaventory, which has a rate equal to all applied coupons.
Note: All compound taxes/discounts have a name of the concatenation, separated by “-“, of individual tax/discount’s name.
Example of a compound discount consisting of Free987, an30 and newdiscount coupons is Free987-an30-newdiscount.
  3. Coupons can be deleted from WooCommerce, but not from Megaventory. Once a coupon is created and deleted in WooCommerce, it will only be available as a draft due to clashes with Megaventory.
  4. The rate of the fixed price coupons can be updated in WooCommerce.
  5. The rate of percentage coupons rate cannot be updated.
  6. All coupons are continuously be synchronized from WooCommerce to Megaventory. User can also manually replicate (in WooCommerce) all percentage discounts present in Megaventory using a button in the Megaventory plugin. Coupons not following any of the guidelines specified above can exist only as drafts in WooCommerce (to allow edits).

How is synchronization between WooCommerce and Megaventory working?

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There are two types of synchronization between WooCommerce and Megaventory.

Initial synchronization

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The Initial synchronization which should be done right after the integration and in most cases will never be required again. Sometimes, it can also be used to recover from system failures. This process recreates all products, clients, taxes, coupons which did not exist in Megaventory, but are present in WooCommerce. It also updates some details of all products and clients (the exact fields are specified below). Please find the instructions on how to execute the initial synchronization later in this section.

Continuous synchronization

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The Continuous synchronization, which does not require any extra actions or steps, but happens in the background. It can be divided into two categories:
Megaventory to WooCommerce – performed periodically.
  • Products – changing Megaventory product details imposes the same changes on the corresponding WooCommerce products. Deleting a Megaventory product also deletes its WooCommerce equivalent.Creating new products in Megaventory does not result in any changes to the WooCommerce products database.
  • Stock – if the stock levels of any product change, the information is passed to WooCommerce.
  • Order status – if the order status is changed in Megaventory, it is also updated in WooCommerce automatically. The plugin does not synchronize returns and refunds – those have to be resolved manually.
WooCommerce to Megaventory – triggered by introducing changes inWooCommerce and performed immediately.
  • Products – creating, updating or deleting products in WooCommerce results in those changes being immediately performed in Megaventory as well. (Deleting products in WooCommerce is not advised, esp. if stock of that product in Megaventory is not zero. It is suggested to hide (unpublish) the products and delete them in Megaventory after the stock is depleted.)
  • Clients – creating, updating clients in WooCommerce results in those changes being immediately performed in Megaventory as well.
  • Coupons – creating, updating, using coupons in WooCommerce results in creating, updating discounts in Megaventory. In specific cases, this process may create new discounts which do not exist in WooCommerce,but are necessary to proceed (more on that in Coupons section).
  • Taxes – creating taxes in WooCommerce creates corresponding taxes in Megaventory. Updating Taxes is not allowed.
  • Orders – any orders placed in WooCommerce create corresponding Sales Orders in Megaventory.

What kinds of Initial synchronizations can be launched manually?

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There are three actions of Initial synchronization:
  • Importing clients from WooCommerce to Megaventory.
  • Importing products from WooCommerce to Megaventory.
  • Importing only percentage discounts from WooCommerce to Megaventory.
All the above are available in the Initialization section in the Megaventory plugin settings.
It is strongly recommended executing all three synchronizations immediately after integration and before taking any other actions. Note that all three steps may take some time to complete, and they should not be interrupted.

Troubleshooting using WooCommerce with Megaventory in the WooCoommerce interface

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You can troubleshoot any issues that arise in the WooCommerce – Megaventory connection in the WooCommerce interface

To do that you need to enter the Megaventory administrator panel in WooCommerce by clicking a link on the sidebar.

On top of the admin panel, you can see three sections: status, setup, and initialization.

The Status section indicates the status of the plugin:

Connection indicates whether a connection with Megaventory servers could be established. If this item indicates an issue, make sure your servers are online. If so, then the problem probably lies on the Megaventory side and you should contact our support.

Key indicates whether the API key is correct.

Currency indicates whether the Megaventory and WooCommerce main currencies match.

Initialized indicates whether the plugin has been initiated.

If any of those items does not indicate success, the plugin is completely halted until the issues are resolved. Problems should be taken care of starting from the top of the list – e.g. Problems with connection will also cause other statuses to indicate failure (with no connection, there is no way to check if the API key is correct, or if the currencies match). Taking care of the uppermost problem will often solve the problems below.

The following sections can help identify the cause of any issues that come up and how to address them.

Interface – Error Log

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Beneath the top of the interface, you can find the error log. It shows all the information about when and where the plugin encountered problems. The list is sorted with the most recent issues on top.

The table consists of the following columns:

ID – the id of the error message

Megaventory ID – The Megaventory ID of the entity the error refers to. 0 or negative values mean that this ID is not relevant (e.g. The entity does not exist in Megaventory yet, or the plugin failed to find ID).

WooCommerce ID – The WooCommerce ID of the entity the error refers to. 0 or negative values mean that the ID is irrelevant in this case.

Created at – Indicates when the error was logged.

Error type – the type of the error. There are three error types:

Warning – This explicitly notifies about some actions that happen behind the scenes but do not necessarily mean that something went wrong.

Error – This indicates that something went wrong, most usually an entity (Client, Product, etc.) failed to be saved for some reason.

Fatal – This causes the whole plugin to halt, instead of affecting just certain processes only. In most cases, such an error means additional notices in the status section of the interface.

Entity name – the name of the entity the error refers to. This may sometimes be empty, when the name of the entity doesn’t exist, etc.

Problem – the description of what the problem is; this description is supposed to quickly and comprehensively describe what happened.

Full Message – the full description of the problem.

Error code – The code of the error. This is aimed to be a reference for programmers or the Megaventory team.

Most often errors appear because an entity (Product, Client, Order, etc.) was not correctly synchronized due to incorrect details (name too long, SKU missing, the product already exists, etc.). In most cases, these issues require a quick manual intervention.

Interface – Taxes Table

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The following table is available below the error log:

Use this table to make sure that taxes are correctly synchronized:

Every tax should be represented with a separate row in the table

Every tax must have a Megaventory id. If the Megaventory id column is empty, zero, or has a negative value, this tax is not correctly synchronized and will cause problems. Refer to the error log for more information.

Megaventory Features

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An extensive list of the Megaventory features linked to by means of the WooCommerce integration follows for reference. Inventory Management
  • Multiple Locations / Warehouses / Stores
  • Stock Alerts
  • Returns of Goods from Clients / to Suppliers
  • Supplier Availability and Lead Times
  • Inventory Changes over Time
  • Product Cost Tracking over Time
  • Serial Numbers
  • Transfer between Locations

Order Fulfillment

  • Sales Orders from Clients
  • Purchase Orders to Suppliers
  • Sales Quotes for Clients
  • Shipping Providers
  • Partial Shipping / Partial Receiving
  • Consignment Sales and Purchases
  • Dropshipping Sales and Purchases
  • Automated Fulfillment Capability Check
  • Services
Report Creation
  • Inbound and Outbound Movements
  • Availability Levels
  • Gross Profit
  • Inventory Value
  • Business Intelligence ready
  • Report Sharing to Users
  • Picking and Packing Slips
  • Delivery Slips

Manufacturing Tracking

  • Bill of Materials
  • Allocation of Components to Work Orders
  • Full / Partial Receipt of Finished Goods
  • Quick / Bulk Manufacturing Updates
  • Multiple Level Manufacturing
  • Work in Process Cost
  • Labor Costs per Work Order
  • Work Order Printouts

Data Administration

  • Sophisticated User Permissions
  • Detailed User Activity Logs
  • Backup and Restore at any Time
  • Data Import / Data Export
  • Drilldown Data Capable
  • Multiple Currencies
  • Currency Exchange Rates
  • Pricing Rules
  • Contacts Management

Software Customization

  • Localized into Multiple Languages
  • User Customizable Texts
  • Rich and Straightforward API
  • Custom Document and Invoice Templates
  • Custom Automatic Invoice Numbering
  • Barcode Scanning / Barcode Printing
  • Direct Data Access via Intuitive Cards
  • Multiple Integrations

Contact Us

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Feel free to reach out to us on the following channels to learn about more recent developments and updates to the app – as well as receive helpful industry material: Website Blog Facebook Twitter LinkedIn We’re also available for a free, screen-sharing demo of the solution and its integration with WooCommerce – just book a time here!
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