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Daily Operations

Inventory Management

All Plans

CloudBridal provides powerful tools to manage your store's inventory, making it easy to track items, manage variants, process sales, and handle special orders. This guide covers the essential features of the inventory management system.

Contents

Prerequisites

Before you enter any inventory items, you should first ensure that you've properly configured your inventory settings. Please refer to the Inventory Settings documentation for more information.

What Inventory Represents in CloudBridal

Many believe that inventory management is only important for physical products, but this is not the full picture. Inventory in CloudBridal can be used to manage any item that you sell, whether it's a physical product, a service, an add-on, etc. When your inventory is properly set up, the sales process will go smoothly and efficiently.

Items in CloudBridal are structured based on their Item Type. This is a way to categorize your items so that you can manage them accordingly. Common item types include:

  • Dresses
  • Accessories
  • Veils
  • Services
  • Fees
  • Add-ons/Customizations
  • Other

You should customize the item types that are available to you in the Inventory Item Settings and make sure that you've covered all of the different types of items that you sell through your store.

💡 Tip: If an item is not a physical product, make sure to disable the Quantity field for that item type. This will prevent the system from tracking it as physical inventory.

How Inventory is Created

Inventory items are created in three main ways:

  1. By adding a new inventory item through the Inventory page. This is the easiest and most straightforward way to create an inventory item.
  2. When receiving a Stock Purchase Order.
  3. Through the Data Import tool. This is mainly intended to help you import your initial inventory when you first set up your store.

The Inventory Item Form

When you add or edit an inventory item, the inventory item form will appear. This form shows you all the relevant information for the item, and allows you to manage the item accordingly.

Core Item Details

The left side of the form includes the core item details:

  • Item Type: The item's main category (e.g. Dress, Accessory, Veil, etc.)
  • Vendor: The supplier or designer of the item
  • Internal Item Name: This is ususally the vendor's item name.
  • Display Name: This defaults to the internal item name, but you can customize it as needed. For example, if you private label a dress, you may want to use your own name as the display name. This name displays all all customer-facing places like receipts, labels, etc.
  • Discontinued: If checked, this means the item is no longer available for special order from the vendor.
  • Disposed: If checked, this means the item is no longer available for sale and is only being maintained for historical records. Typically, you would also 0 out the quantity of the item when it is disposed.
  • Images: You can upload images of the item, or use the search tool Ultimate Plan to find matching images online.

Stocked Items & Varieties

This section defines your available inventory and its pricing.

Available Colors for Special Order

This field allows you to specify the different color options that this item can be ordered in. Only visible when the item type has color tracking enabled. These colors will be selectable in the order form when a customer wants to order this item.

💡 Tip: Did you know that you can define colors and color groups for each vendor? This can make it easier to enter inventory items for these vendors. See the Vendors documentation for more information.

Stocked Items

This table allows you to capturethe different varieties of the item that you have in stock. Based on how you've configured the item type, these fields may be available:

  • Size or Name: For items with size tracking enabled (e.g. Dress), this is the size of the item. For other items, this is the name of the item's variety.
  • Color: Available if color tracking is enabled for the item type.
  • Variety: This displays only when you have added more than 1 variety for this item - see Varieties Available for Special Order below.
  • Quantity: Current stock level for this variety.
  • Pricing:
    • Wholesale Price (if enabled): The cost to order this variety from the vendor.
    • Retail Price (required): The item's suggested retail price (MSRP).
    • Sale Price (required): The actual price that you sell this variety for. This is automatically set to the retail price, but you can change it to something different if needed.

The system includes a retail markup calculator (the purple tag button) to help determine appropriate pricing based on wholesale costs.

Varieties Available for Special Order

These represent variations available for special ordering from vendors:

  • Create different options for special orders (e.g., lined vs. unlined, standard vs. custom length)
  • Each variety can have its own pricing structure
  • Track which variations are available for special order

If you've added more than 1 variety for an item, you will then need to set which variety you have in stock (if any). Additionally, the variety becomes a required field in the order form, and is also then surfaced for purchase orders.

Item Notes

You can add any free-form notes about the item here. This is useful for adding information that you don't want to display to customers, but still want to keep track of.

Item Attributes

Depending on the item type, different attributes may be available:

Dress-Specific Attributes

  • Fabrics: Materials used in the dress
  • Silhouettes: Dress silhouette styles
  • Necklines: Types of necklines
  • Embellishments: Decorative elements
  • Season: The season the item belongs to
  • Year: The year the item was released

All of these attribute options can be configured in the Inventory Item Settings.

Item Tags

You can also add tags to the item. Tags are custom labels to apply to the item, and have several uses:

  • Filtering: You can filter items by tag in the inventory list.
  • Inventory Showcase: You can surface tags in the inventory showcase, which allows your clients to view items by tag.

Inventory Showcase

Ultimate Plan

Control how items appear in your online showcase:

  • Showcase Description: Public-facing description of the item
  • Hide from Showcase: Option to exclude items from public view

Label Printing

Core Plan

CloudBridal integrates with DYMO Label printers to allow you to print labels for your inventory items. To learn more on how to set this up, please refer to the Label Printing documentation.

Related Features

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Making a Sale