How Magento MSI Solved Offline Inventory Problem in POS App?

Multi-Source Inventory(MSI) allows you to manage the inventory of a product by source(Location) within the Magento 2 webstore.

Magento manages a single inventory system for each product and due to this, it gets tough to manage multi-channel inventories for a single website. But now, after the inclusion of MSI feature in Magento 2.3.0 the inventory can be managed for each of the channels very easily.

You can manage the inventory of a single product for multiple locations by allocating the sources to the different locations. This feature has come handy to solve the inventory management within our Magento 2 POS system allowing us to create separate set of inventories for different sources.

Consider that the POS system is working in Offline mode and you have assigned a main product with quantity of 100(50 for web and 50 For POS). Now the issue that can arise is that, if the salesperson sells out more than 50 quantity.

Now, when the POS system comes online then there will be issues with the inventory sync. What this means is that there will be no actual physical stock available to ship for the extra orders that have been placed through the POS system.

This is taken care by the MSI system, where in the store owner can now create and manage the inventory of a product by location wise. The stock is assigned to the locations and each location’s respective inventory is separate from the web.

We shall see that how we can make use of the Multi-Source Inventory feature to manage the inventory within the Point Of Sale system.

In the POS system, for each outlet we have to select an option “Source“. This source can be created by navigating through Stores>Inventory>Sources and clicking the Add New Source button.

Manage Source:

If we are selling products from multi-location like Delhi, Noida and others then we will need to create sources for each inventory location.

Manage Stock:

Here we will need to create stock for each channel (Magento Websites, if there are multi website configured in your Magento) so that we can assign sources(from where we are selling our products) for each channel.

After this, we can assign the stock to the product by navigating to the edit product page and clicking the Assign Sources button.

In the backend of the POS System, we have created an Outlet and for each outlet we have an option to select a source that we already created from the Source part of the MSI. Here, we have attached Source as Delhi.

Now, below we have a product Joust Duffle Bag that is having inventory for Delhi =33 and in Noida =47.

Now, let’s make a checkout using the same product within the POS system by tapping the Pay button.

After this you can see the success message as well for the placed order.

The stock has reduced from the assigned source for this particular outlet.

This is the stock assignment for separate locations. And how each location’s respective inventory is separate i.e Separate for the web and separate for all the created sources.

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