Stock management in WooCommerce: Complete guide to managing your inventory (2023)

Want to keep your customers happy? Make sure your WooCommerce stock status is always updated and provide clear messaging about out of stock and discontinued products!

Managing your store's inventory can be a daunting task, especially if you deal with customized or built-to-order items or face stock issues. It is crucial to set appropriate expectations with customers regarding their orders. Clear displaying stock availability and lead times will ensure smooth business operations. In this tutorial, we will guide you through the process of managing inventory and adding WooCommerce stock status to your store.

We will discuss how to display stock quantity and other information on your online store. We will also explore ways to showcase stock statuses to provide your customers with clear and accurate information. To do this, we’ll learn how to use the WooCommerce Lead Time plugin to display product availability and waiting times.

Moreover, we will delve into another often-overlooked topic: Managing discontinued products using the WooCommerce Discontinued Products plugin. We will discuss how this plugin can help you remove products that are no longer available or relevant from your e-commerce platform without losing any valuable data or SEO benefit. 

With our step-by-step guide, you can effortlessly manage your inventory settings and ensure that your customers have a positive shopping experience.

What is stock management?

In a nutshell, WooCommerce stock management covers every aspect of a business’s inventory management system including ordering, storing, tracking, controlling, and stock reports. It applies to every item a business uses to produce its products or services – from raw materials to finished goods.

Stock management is all about managing the products your business plans on selling. It also involves keeping a record of changes to enable stock management (or inventory) over time.

Why is stock management important?

As a store owner, you already know that inventory is a major asset that represents tied-up capital. Managing stock effectively enables businesses to free up that capital.

Efficient stock control requires smart store managers to have a solid understanding of the mix of different kinds of stock and acknowledge the demands on that stock. This helps keep a reasonable stock level thereby balancing the need for surplus supplies with the need to reduce tied-up capital.

Managing stock efficiently also helps you provide the best customer service by ensuring you have the products your customers want. In other words, it allows you to achieve supply and demand balancing. It also helps minimize loss due to excess inventory (high product level) of items that don’t sell well.

Proper WooCommerce stock management also aids in forecasting product needs and ordering accurate quantities of products. On the flip side, poor stock management can affect your business in different ways. For starters, you can easily lose sales if customers can’t buy the items they need because of low stock threshold issues.

As well as managing stock WooCommerce, you need an effective way to communicate stock information to customers. Keep reading to learn the best way to do this in your WooCommerce store.

How to manage stock in WooCommerce

There are plenty of common scenarios where store managers need to show the WooCommerce stock status on the front end:

• Out of stock visibility of products.
• To show the lead time between order and delivery.
• For limited batches of products or products that are time-bound.

The WooCommerce plugin offers some stock management features out of the box. To use these features, you have to enable the WooCommerce Manage stock option. You can do this by heading over to WooCommerce → Settings → Products → Inventory from the admin panel.

From the same screen, you can also enable stock notifications and set low-stock and out of stock thresholds for products. It also gives you the option to select a Stock display format.

Once you've enabled WooCommerce stock management, you can do the following for each product/variation:

• Choose a WooCommerce stock status of either In Stock, Out of Stock products, or On Backorder (with or without an option to notify the customer of the backorder status).
• Set the exact number of products in stock. When customers buy the product, WooCommerce will reduce the number in stock automatically. It will then alert you of low stock levels via email, and change the product to Out of Stock status when it runs out.

This covers the basics of WooCommerce manage stock using the default WooCommerce stock statuses. However, WooCommerce’s stock management features are pretty limited, especially when it comes to communicating stock information to customers. You might also want to create custom WooCommerce stock statuses, such as a status for Discontinued products. Keep reading to learn how to do all this.

How to display WooCommerce stock status and other information

WooCommerce only displays the stock status on the single product page for each item. This isn't ideal because:

The solution is to display WooCommerce stock status and other stock-related information on your main shop pages. You can easily do this with the WooCommerce Lead Time plugin.

WooCommerce Lead Time lets you:

It’s the perfect solution for selling custom, made-to-order, or non-stock products and to give customers the correct information before they make purchase orders.

WooCommerce Lead Time is incredibly lightweight and works with whatever theme you’re already using on your online store. It gives you complete control over the WooCommerce stock status. As a result, you can increase transparency with your customers.

You also get access to highly-rated customer support which can help you every step of the way.

Here’s what you need to do to display the WooCommerce stock status and other information in your store:

Step #1: Get the WooCommerce Lead Time plugin

Get the WooCommerce Lead Time plugin if you haven’t done so already. You’ll receive the plugin files and license key in a confirmation email.

Log into your WordPress website and install and activate the plugin. Go to WooCommerce → Settings → Products → Lead time from the admin panel. Enter your license key and click the Save changes button to continue.

Step #2: Show WooCommerce stock status and lead times in your store

You can use the WooCommerce Lead Time plugin to show stock status information and lead times in prominent places in your e-commerce store. This includes the shop page, category pages, product pages, cart pages, and checkout pages. You can also set it up to show WooCommerce lead times in order detail emails.

By default, it’ll look something like this:

As you can see, WooCommerce Lead Time can display both the product stock status and lead time on the shop page and category pages. This way, customers can see which products are in stock before they click on them.

Doing this helps you enhance the shopping experience on your online store. Customers no longer have to click through to each product to find out if the product is available for purchase. With the WooCommerce Lead Time plugin, they can quickly see the product stock status at a glance when they’re browsing the shop page or category pages.

Alternative method 1: Display WooCommerce stock status in a product table

Another way to show WooCommerce lead times on the shop page or on category pages is by using the WooCommerce Product Table plugin. It lets you list products anywhere on your website. All you have to do is add a stock and lead_time column to the table:

Other columns you can display include SKUs, images, price, and add-to-cart buttons.

Alternative method 2: Display WooCommerce stock status in a quick view lightbox

A third way to display the WooCommerce stock status and lead time is by using the WooCommmerce Quick View Pro plugin. It works by adding quick-view buttons on your shop and category pages. Customers can view product information – including the lead time – in a quick view lightbox:

WooCommerce Lead Time lets you display the lead time on the cart and checkout pages. However, you can also use WooCommerce Fast Cart if you want to shorten the purchase flow. By doing this, you can display the lead time in a pop-up cart.

Step #3: Set the processing time

Using WooCommerce Lead Time, you can set the processing time globally or per category, simple product, or variation (variable products).

You can set the processing time globally by going to WooCommerce → Settings → Products → Lead time and entering the lead time in the Global lead time field.

To set the processing time on a product category basis, go to Products → Categories and choose either Static (enter static lead time text) or Dynamic (calculate the processing time dynamically) using the dropdown from the Lead time field.

WooCommerce Lead Time also lets you set the processing time for individual products (and variations). Open the product you want to set a processing time for in the Edit Product screen. Scroll down to the Product data section and click on the Inventory tab. From here, you can set the lead time for the product. You can also do this for variable products.

Step #4: Customize the lead time wording and text color

One of the best features of the WooCommerce Lead Time plugin is that it lets you customize the lead time wording and text color. This means that you can tweak it to get the exact look and feel you want.

For example, you might consider changing the custom status wording to something like:

• Available on
• Ready to despatch in
• Handling time
• Waiting time
• Made to order

Check out our article on Choosing the right wording for your WooCommerce Product Lead Times for inspiration and ideas on setting a custom stock status.

To change the text color, go to the plugin’s settings page (WooCommerce → Settings → Products → Lead time) and use the Lead time text color option to select a new color.

Managing discontinued products

Before we close, there’s another important area of WooCommerce stock management that store owners should be aware of.

When a product reaches the end of its natural lifecycle and will not be available for purchase again, it’s a discontinued product.

WooCommerce itself doesn’t offer a way to mark discontinued products. However, you can easily do this with Barn2’s WooCommerce Discontinued Products plugin. It adds a Discontinued custom stock status to WooCommerce. This makes it easy to mark products and variations as discontinued, without ruining SEO or marking them incorrectly as in-stock, on backorder, or out-of-stock status.

What is the WooCommerce Discontinued Products plugin?

WooCommerce Discontinued Products is a plugin that allows users to manage and display products that are no longer available for purchase on their online store. This plugin is useful for businesses that have a large inventory of products and regularly retire old items.

By using the WooCommerce Discontinued Products plugin, businesses can remove discontinued items from their active inventory levels but still keep them visible to customers who may be searching for them. This feature can help prevent frustration for customers who may be searching for a specific item and unable to find it on the website.

Furthermore, the plugin allows for customization of the message displayed to customers who may come across discontinued products. This message can provide information about the reason for the product's discontinuation, offer alternative product suggestions, or encourage customers to sign up for email notifications if the product becomes available again in the future.

WooCommerce Discontinued Products is compatible with the other WooCommerce inventory management plugins featured in this article. For example, you can display the discontinued product message in the product table and quick view lightbox.

Check out our tutorial on How to Add a WooCommerce Product Discontinued Status to your Store for instructions on how to display a custom stock status on your WordPress site.

The easy way to provide stock information to customers

Having a WordPress plugin that helps you improve communication around WooCommerce stock status is essential for many reasons:

In this guide, you've learned how to use the standard WooCommerce inventory settings to manage your stock. You're also learned how to improve communication with customers using the WooCommerce Lead Time plugin. This adds all the extras that you need for effective communication about your inventory status. For example, you can show stock statuses and lead times prominently in your store, set processing times, and customize the wording to best fit the types of products you sell.

Get the WooCommerce Lead Time plugin today!