Once you've enabled inventory management for your store, it's time to add actual inventory data to your catalog. You add inventory on the Inventory page:

Note:

• The Inventory link (under Process) doesn't appear in Store Manager until you have enabled the inventory management system. If you are in Catalog Manager, clicking the Inventory tab will also take you to the Inventory page.
• Any changes you make to inventory quantity data on the Inventory page go live as soon as you click Save, in other words, you don't have to publish your Catalog Manager.

Add inventory quantity data

1. Sign in to your My Services page.
2. Click the Store link.
   
3. Click the Inventory link.
   
4. Click the Edit button. This activates the Quantity column fields, where you can type the quantities for each product. You can display up to 100 items at a time by changing the Items Per Page pull-down menu.
   
5. Under Quantity, enter the quantity of each item.
   
6. When you're finished entering in the quantity data, click the Save button.This takes you back to the Inventory page, where you can confirm the current inventory level for each item.

If you want to save time on inventory updates, you can use a CSV (comma separated value) data file to upload new inventory levels for some or all of your products. The best way to create your first inventory CSV file is to download the current version of your file from the inventory management system.

Download your current Inventory data file

1. Sign in to your My Services page.
2. Click the Store link.
   
3. Click the Inventory link.
   
4. Click the Download button. This takes you to the Download Inventory page.
   
5. Make sure the Choose Table pull-down menu is set to its default value of All Tables, then click the Download button. Depending on your web browser configuration, either the file will open automatically in a spreadsheet application or you will be prompted to save or open the file.
   
6. Save the file in CSV format.

Once the inventory file is open in your spreadsheet application, you can add inventory levels to each product. The file consists of two columns:

• Code - The item Code
• Quantity - Current inventory level

Once your data file is complete, save it in CSV format, and then do the following to upload the file.

Upload your updated Inventory data file

1. Return to the Inventory tab and click the Upload button.This takes you to the Upload Inventory page.
   
2. Click the Browse button to locate the inventory data file on your computer, select the file, and click Open to place the file address in the Choose File section.
   
3. Click the Upload button. This takes you to the Upload Summary page.
   
4. If you don't see an error message on the page, or if you know that the error messages are attributable to section page records in the file, click the Save button.
   
5. This returns you to the Inventory page, where you'll see the newly uploaded inventory levels.
   

Note: If you are building your Merchant Solutions site in Store Editor, when you download the inventory CSV file, it will contain rows for all your section pages as well as your product pages. It's necessary to delete these section page rows from the inventory file before you upload new inventory data. If you forget to delete the section page rows in the file, your product records display correctly, but the section page records produce an error message after you upload the file, as shown in Figure 2 below.


 Figure 2: In this example, we did not remove the section pages from the original inventory download file, so the Upload Summary page displays an error message for the section page records (rows 26, 27, and 28). However, the rest of our product inventory data is not affected, so we can click Save to upload the remaining data.

See Also:

• Using the Real-time Inventory Feature

Note: For merchants that edit their inventory using Excel and whose item codes contain leading zeros (for example 00012345), Excel may trim leading zeroes from your CSV file upon opening the file. Your inventory codes would then be incorrect upon uploading. You can avoid this issue with Excel by following the instructions listed below.

Edit your inventory data if your item codes contain leading zeroes

1. Download and save your CSV file as shown in steps 1-3 above.
2. Rename the file to remove the extension (to remove .csv, you must have your desktop/folder options set to display file extensions). You will be prompted with the warning that changing the extension will make the file unusable. Proceed.
3. Open Microsoft Excel.
4. Open your inventory file. Click File | Open | All Files (*.*) > open the inventory file. You will be prompted with the Text Import Wizard.
5. Text Import Wizard - Step 1 - click Next.
6. Text Import Wizard - Step 2 - select Comma as the only delimiter. Click Next.
7. Text Import Wizard - Step 3 - change column data format to TEXT. Click Finish.

Once the inventory file is open in your spreadsheet application, you can add inventory levels to each product. The file consists of two columns:

• Code - The item Code
• Quantity - Current inventory level

Once your data file is complete save it in CSV format, then upload the file as discussed above.