When does inventory get depleted for user choice clubs?
Inventory is depleted when the orders are processed, not when the user choice selections are made.
If this is true, then it seems that when you set up a user choice with limited wines inventory that you would need to set a side enough bottles of wine for every user to choose the maximun number of bottles.
For example if you had 10 clubs members in a user choice club, and you set up the club for each member to get one bottle of Petit Verdot, but they could choose to trade to get up to two bottles, then you would need to set aside 20 bottles of Petit Verdot just in case everyone choose to do that.
If you had 15 bottles in inventory, the software would not know to limit only 5 customer to get a second bottle of Petit Verdot.
You understand the system correctly but we have never found this to be a problem. We have about 450 club members and about 10% customize each shipment. A few add extra bottles but most just switch bottles out to match their preferred varietals. Thus it is rare we would see a major jump in one particular wine being sold as the swaps tend to balance out. We set our system to stop selling when we are down to our last 4 cases and we set those aside for our library. Thus a wine with less than four cases left won’t appear to be available so that gives us a 48 bottle “buffer” to deal with situations like you are describing (and you can adjust the number of bottles left before the system shows a wine as sold out). The key is not to set it at zero.
We have a Report called User Choice Club Report which should help with the planning of your Inventory. It’s found under Reports > Club Members > User Choice Club Seasons. This report contains a column listing your Club Member’s selection. We recommend summing up these columns to asses how many bottles you will need and when it’s close to running out.
If you find one of your SKU selling out, you can adjust the User Choice Club Season and add “(Sold Out)” to the end of your Consumer Description for the product, and change the Max Qty to 0, which will prevent more club members from selecting it.
Thank you both for your help. Good advice and the report is helpful.
I did a test run on a club, and it allowed me to add up to the maximum amount of a particular wine to an order, BUT it allowed me to deplete the inventory below zero.
So, does the software allow a person to put a wine in their shipment if the inventory that the club shipment is set to be drawn from is zero or below zero?
Did you try to use the POS or Admin Panel to over-purchase the same wines? You may need to double check your inventory settings to make sure that particular product is set to not sell below zero.
I create a “season” and ran a club shipment which sent me an email to login to my account to choose my wines. I was trying to set it up exactly like it would be for an actual club shipment.
Others on this blog have said that the inventory is not reduced in WineDirect inventory until all club shipments are processed. So, that goes along with that. But it does seem difficult if I can’t have a set limit on the total inventory.
Thank. I’ll try it again as soon as I have some more time.
Hi there, i tried this. my dilemma is that the sku that were running low on is one of our default wines in this qtrs club package. so the default qty initially selected for most club members is 2. if i go in now and change the max qty to 0, some members already have that particular sku selected at 2 by default in their user choice list. If they go into their account online to modify their order, even if they leave that one alone and make other wine modifications, when they go to submit the request, it will come back with an error msg saying that that sku cannot have more than 0 bottles.
I think i already know how i am going to remedy this, but any suggestions?
This is the problem that I see with the user choice system. Let’s say you have 100 club members.
If you allow anyone to choice 4 bottles of a certain wine, then you have to have 400 bottles just in case. If you only had 240 bottles of this wine, and 60 people ordered 4 bottles a piece than there is no way to stop any other club member for ordering up to 4 bottles other than just send some an apology after the shipment to run saying that you are sorry that their order can’t be filled.
I don’t put the wine on for a user choice club unless I can fulfill 75% or more of the club members choosing the maximun number of bottles.
I wish, wish, wish that it was tied into inventory because then club members could buy down to the last bottles of inventory.
The way it is, the software prevents us from offering the user choice on more than our top clubs.
Thank you for the feedback! I totally agree. I do usually go about it that way and only put wines on there that i know we have more than enough inventory of. But this time, i decided to try it out. should’ve tested it more first. Good news is that i think we will be ok on this one but wont be doing this again in the future. lol
thanks again for your input!
They way I handle the inventory is a pretty manual, but it does handle this well enough for me. I tell my customers that I will process their orders as soon as they are submitted. Then if I am low or out of a wine, I just switch it for something else.
I do open up a couple other issues (some people don’t realize I am going to process early, I am not always sitting there all day manually processing club orders one by one) but if I am worried about inventory that is what I end up doing.
How well this works can depend on what you promise your customers. I would say that you could lower the max allowed form 4 to 3 or 2 on those wines, but if you are promising up to 4 I can see your problem.
