What is the best way to manage warehouses in online shop, particularly PrestaShop?

[Ali Samie]

I am looking for the most suitable way to manage the warehouse in an online shop with prestashop. I checked all the modules already and they are not even close to a WMS (warehouse management system) as they are designed for small businesses.

When it comes to a medium to large size business with a big warehouse of 200k items, you need an automatic way to manage every thing in warehouse. This system might be as a module installed in prestashop or an external web application or software that is connected with our online shop.

I think there are very good reasons to use an external software such as it lets you integrate it with mobile applications to be used by warehouse workers, drivers, and maybe third-party delivery services.

I am looking for the real example in prestashop world. I want to know if any of you have seen such thing working with prestashop or any thing that you think is a good option to think about.

Our case, is I think very similar to other businesses too. Imagine you have a series of shelves in your warehouse, you need to put some rules with numbers, serial numbers or barcodes to make it easy for workers to find items and restock them. I am looking for a ready tool which provides such features as basic, because prestashop does not have any of these

[s4lvozesta]

I am very much interested on this topic.

I implement prestashop, custom-made software (external), and their integration. Recently for my client, we implement integration of ERP (in main distribution centre), POS (in each retail shops), and ecommerce (prestashop). It results in my client inventory being connected across 20 offline branches and 1 online store having 20,000 unique SKUs and >800,000 quantity in total. Such integration reduces out-of-stock, increase availability for customer, add sales point from the same inventory source, and efficiency in inventory management for both offline and online business altogether.

We, too, notice different operation in online and offline business. Our client operates on both. Hence, we develop different software for each and integrate all.

 

[Ali Samie]

20 hours ago, s4lvozesta said:

I am very much interested on this topic.

I implement prestashop, custom-made software (external), and their integration. Recently for my client, we implement integration of ERP (in main distribution centre), POS (in each retail shops), and ecommerce (prestashop). It results in my client inventory being connected across 20 offline branches and 1 online store having 20,000 unique SKUs and >800,000 quantity in total. Such integration reduces out-of-stock, increase availability for customer, add sales point from the same inventory source, and efficiency in inventory management for both offline and online business altogether.

We, too, notice different operation in online and offline business. Our client operates on both. Hence, we develop different software for each and integrate all.

 

Yes this is interesting because the website, tech behind the scenes and other stuff are not that much important, warehouse management and logistics are the most critical part of the online sellers.

I tried using Ongoing WMS, I could map our warehouse, floors, aisles and shelves, but still not configured completely, if I find it helpful will surly post here about it. So far I liked it very much

[Slayem]

Hello, 

Have you found a solution for the warehouse configuration in prestashop ?
My client needs to configure his stores (or point of sale) and give access to manage the assigned stock for each store manager.

Do I have to develop a specific module for a WMS in prestashop ?

It was me who chose prestashop for my client's e-commerce.
if you have any suggestions for another e-commerce platform that offers a pre-configured warhouse management system, please suggest it .. I will be a taker and I can migrate to this plateforme (I have no constraint or obligation to work with prestashop ! )

Another question:
how to configure  employee as a commercial to manage the stock he is assigned to in prestashop ?

Thanks for you 

[Nickz]

On 1/22/2023 at 2:01 AM, Ali Samie said:

Imagine you have a series of shelves in your warehouse, you need to put some rules with numbers, serial numbers or barcodes to make it easy for workers to find items and restock them. I am looking for a ready tool which provides such features as basic, because prestashop does not have any of these

I imagine you need to use prestashop as the shop software on and offline, you would most likey need a custom programming for the place your items are located in the warehouse. You might be able to use the shipping module as the offline handler.

 

9 minutes ago, Slayem said:

It was me who chose prestashop for my client's e-commerce.
if you have any suggestions for another e-commerce platform that offers a pre-configured warhouse management system, please suggest it .. I will be a taker and I can migrate to this plateforme (I have no constraint or obligation to work with prestashop ! )

There is shopware, magento, thirtybees later has the same "limitations" as prestashop.

[s4lvozesta]

If you mean to have multiple virtual warehouses in prestashop, I do not think it ever exists in prestashop.
For example, there are product A with 100 qty distributed to 4 virtual warehouses , 25 each.

For my case with previous implementation, prestashop is part of the whole system.

At first, in the ERP backbone, we create a virtual warehouse for stocks in prestashop (other warehouses are for physical store branches).
This method has drawback because when online sales is low, the stocks need to be manually transferred to other virtual warehouses.
For example, warehouse A has 25, warehouse B has 25. The next day, warehouse A has 0, warehouse B has 20. To boost sales, the stocks are transferred to warehouse B.

In offline store setting, it would depend on physical location and travel time. But with ecommerce, the setback is more obvious because customers could not purchase online while stocks are not touched in physical stores.

Then, we implemented a different approach where prestashop could read ALL stocks on the physical store branches.
For example, in prestashop product page, customer can choose s/he want to send from store A, store B, or store C (depending on shipping fee).
By doing this, prestashop simply does not have stock. But it reads all stocks from all stores.

 

I have no experience in separation of stocks into virtual warehouses within prestashop. Also, no experience in giving user access specifically for a virtual warehouse. 
Maybe, multi-store can do that. But it would be different storefront

[Ali Samie]

19 minutes ago, Slayem said:

Do I have to develop a specific module for a WMS in prestashop ?

In my opinion, it should be handled with an external application, particularly if the business is going to have over 50k products.

There are multiple choices. You can use ready-to-use online apps, or WMS based on PHP to host on your servers, or even make it yourself as an app.

There is this possibility to make a prestashop module for this too, but let me be honest, not every idea is good for a module and not everything should become a module.

If you add this as a module, you are adding more load on your server. Do you want your customers to suffer from this extra load, and wait more for pages to come up?

The other reason is that WMS is completely another application, it just does not make sense to put it inside prestashop as a module.

[Slayem]

Thank you for your answers, 

After 4 months of setting up the shop for my client, we received +500 orders and +200 registered customers.
In this time, the owner has created physical shops (stores) and he wants a unique management of his stocks.

I wanted to know if there is a temporary solution to put in place for the management of its warehouses.

Indeed s4lvozesta, the description you detailed is similar to my client's situation. there are online sales and offline sales with a single stock management system.
I tried the prestashop multi-store to differentiate product sales in retail and wholesale, but I have abandoned this solution since it requires two different front-store and more management .. it's not recommended to use.

In fact, it is planned with my client to set up an ERP system to manage its activities and which integrates a WMS according to its specific needs.

Thank you Ali Sami and Nickz for these interesting details. 

[s4lvozesta]

Has anyone used OpenWMS? 
https://github.com/openwms/org.openwms

or other open source WMS?

[stevell]

Did you ever find a solution for this?