What exactly is vendor management and how does it work? Need some ideas and tips
https://magento.stackexchange.com/questions/159379
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06-10-2020 - |
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I am trying to learn MAGENTO 2 to develop Online E-commerce platform for my company. Everything is going well, and in line with what I planned. However, I have a few doubts about the working of an e-commerce setup, which I wanted to ask you.
The most important thing that I needed to understand is What exactly is vendor management and how does it work with Magento 2?
My knowledge about vendor management is very limited, so I need some suggestions and comments from all of you about the best ways to manage vendors and their inventory.
To give you an example, suppose one of my vendors added PRODUCT A in the catalog. If the vendor has 50 units of the product available as of today, and I am showing 50 units on my website, how do I keep track if he sells a few of those to physical or some other e-commerce site? How exactly does tracking inventory work with vendors? Is there an application or extension of Magento 2 which should be installed at the vendor's end to update the system? Or is it done in some other way?
Kindly help. Thanks in advance
Solution
Vendors are merely your product manufacturers or a re-seller same with an internal inventory.
Having products from multiple vendors you would want to keep inventory as up to date as possible. If any vendor sells a unit that also lists with you, most will have an API or a Data integration point where the inventory on hand at the warehouse of the vendor is sent/pulled from their endpoint API and is processed by a background process, cron/observer/etc. that would update your inventory in Magento so that ideally anytime an item is sold your inventory is updated. Some do run nightly batch processes that don't have high end APIs that are event driven, but a simple CSV/XML file that is uploaded and processed nightly. It really depends on your business requirements. If a order is placed within that day window the customer is simply notified, and/or a replacement or another warehouse, etc.
Vendor management is not so different in a basic form for any ecommerce package.
Magento really only does small/mid size business well, larger size businesses will have multiple vendors which Magento 1/2 are not really geared for, however there's tons of multi-vendor options, 3rd party module wise to make such feature possible:
