Drive sales on autopilot with ecommerce-focused features
See FeaturesWooCommerce inventory management: the ultimate guide
It’s a common misconception that managing ecommerce stock is complicated and time-consuming. While you do need to set up your inventory correctly and update it when necessary, the right ecommerce platform can simplify and streamline the process.
With WooCommerce, you can easily view stock reports, make automatic adjustments, and display stock quantities to customers. You can also integrate the platform with a range of third-party tools to expand its functionality. For instance, you might want to send back-in-stock notifications via email, track inventory across multiple locations, or perform real-time or scheduled bulk edits.
In this post, we’ll take a closer look at the default WooCommerce inventory management system, show you how to set up your WooCommerce inventory, and explore nine excellent tools to enhance the base functionality. Let’s get started!
How WooCommerce inventory management works
WooCommerce is a free, open-source WordPress plugin that transforms a simple website into a fully functional online store. It comes with an optimized checkout page, built-in payment options, and a library of themes and extensions to customize your store.
WooCommerce provides built-in inventory management and tracking to prepare your shop for online orders. When customers purchase items, your stock will be updated accordingly.
You can also access in-depth stock reports that break down important ecommerce metrics to help you identify your top-performing products. The default WooCommerce inventory management system is often powerful enough if you’re just getting started. But as your store grows, you may need a more advanced solution.
Fortunately, there are several WooCommerce extensions and plugins that can help you fill some of the gaps in the base functionality. For instance, Omnisend lets you set up back-in-stock notifications and personalized marketing campaigns based on inventory data. We’ll take a closer look at these tools later in the post.
How to set up and manage WooCommerce inventory
If you’re new to WooCommerce, you may not fully know how to set up and manage your inventory. In this section, we’ll walk you through the basic steps:
1. Add WooCommerce products
To get started with WooCommerce inventory management, you’ll need to add your products to your store. When you activate the plugin, two new tabs will appear in the WordPress dashboard: WooCommerce and Products.
Navigate to Products > Add New. Here, you can provide a product name and add a product description:

On the right side of the page, you can assign your product to specific categories, apply tags, and set a featured image.
One key section is the Product Data box. Here, you’ll need to use the dropdown menu to define your product type. WooCommerce currently offers four options:
- Simple products: Individual items that have no variations or groupings
- Variable products: Items with variations like size or color
- Grouped products: Bundles or collections of other product types that can also be purchased separately
- External/Affiliate products: Products you promote on behalf of third parties, where you earn a commission on each sale
You can also sell virtual and downloadable products by checking the relevant box(es), as shown below:

This removes shipping options from the cart page. With downloadable items, you generally won’t need to worry about inventory management and tracking processes.
2. Enable stock management at the product level
In the next step, we’ll show you how to enable stock management across your entire store. But first, let’s look at how you can manage individual inventory settings.
In the product editor, scroll down to the Product Data box and switch to the Inventory tab:

Here, you’ll find various settings that let you manage and edit stock on a per-product basis:
- SKU: Refers to “stock keeping unit,” allowing you to attribute a unique identifying number to each product. This makes inventory tracking more accurate.
- Stock management: Enables you to track the quantity of stock for a specific item. By checking the box, you can enter the exact number of items you have available.
- Allow backorders: Enables customers to purchase goods even if they’re out of stock.
- Low stock threshold: Triggers an email notification to site admins when the stock quantity falls beneath the specified level. You can set a threshold level on a per-product basis, but a global sitewide threshold can also be set (which we’ll cover later).
- Sold individually: Limits purchases to one item per order. This is particularly useful if you sell limited-quantity items like handmade goods.
After configuring these settings, you can publish or save your product to update it with your changes.
3. Enable stock management across your store
Although we’ve discussed WooCommerce inventory management at the product level, you can also apply some settings across your entire store.
To do this, head to WooCommerce > Settings > Products. Then, click on the Inventory link, as shown below:

First, check the Enable stock management checkbox. This enables WooCommerce to automatically adjust stock quantities and update the stock status when items sell out.
You’ll then see additional settings below, starting with the Hold stock (minutes) option, commonly used across popular ecommerce sites and apps.
Essentially, it determines the length of time that you’ll hold unpaid orders before they get canceled and the products become available to other browsing customers. If you don’t want to use this feature, simply leave the box blank.
Next up is the Notifications setting, which we briefly mentioned earlier. This triggers low stock or out of stock email alerts. You can then define the low stock and out of stock thresholds, which will be applied globally, unless you change the low stock threshold for an individual item.
If you check the Out of stock visibility checkbox, WooCommerce will hide items that are no longer available.
Lastly, the Stock display format setting lets you choose how to present product quantities on your site. You have the option to only show this when stock is low. This is a great way to highlight scarcity and encourage shoppers to act quickly to claim products before they’re all gone.
4. Manage and update WooCommerce inventory
WooCommerce allows you to bulk edit products, which is more efficient than updating each product individually. To do this, go to Products > All Products.
Here, check the box next to the relevant items and use the Bulk actions dropdown at the top and select Edit. Then, click on Apply, which you’ll find next to the dropdown menu:

Now, you can make changes to multiple products at once. You can adjust the price, change the stock status, assign items to product categories, and more.
If you select Yes from the Manage stock dropdown, this will enable individual stock management for the selected items (as we discussed in Step 2). You’ll find this option near the bottom of the bulk editor:

WooCommerce also comes with built-in store analytics, which helps you keep track of your most popular items. To access your inventory reports, click on the Analytics tab in your WordPress dashboard and select Stock.
While in there, you can view the stock status and quantities for your products. You can also click on any of the report headings (e.g., Product/Variation or SKU) to organize the product list, according to these values.
The limitations of the default WooCommerce inventory management tools
As we’ve seen, WooCommerce’s built-in inventory management system certainly gets the job done, but it has a few limitations. Let’s take a look at them:
You can’t track raw materials
Currently, WooCommerce doesn’t offer the ability to track raw materials. Instead, you’re limited to inventory management for finished products only. This means that there’s no way for your company to input or manage inventory for components needed to manufacture your items.
As a result, you may need to track raw materials in a separate program, perhaps using a spreadsheet. This isn’t ideal, as you’ll need to switch between different records to manage all your inventory. Alternatively, you can use a third-party tool to track raw materials — we’ll recommend a solution later in the post.
You can’t track inventory across different locations
By default, WooCommerce only lets you track inventory as a whole. You can’t track products across different locations. This means that the existing system isn’t suitable for business owners that have multiple stores.
It also doesn’t work if you use wholesalers and have inventory on consignment. Again, you’ll need to implement a third-party tool to add this functionality to the platform.
You can only update products manually
As we’ve discussed, when you enter stock quantities and enable stock management, WooCommerce automatically updates your inventory levels when a product gets sold.
However, the current system doesn’t modify product quantities when stock numbers go up. This means that whenever a shipment of products arrives, you’ll need to manually update your product quantities. This can be very time-consuming if you sell a large variety of items.
The best WooCommerce inventory management tools
Now that you’re aware ofWooCommerce’s inventory management limitations, let’s take a look at nine of the best tools to extend and enhance its default system:
1. Omnisend

Omnisend is a complete email and SMS automation tool that helps you reduce cart abandonment and increase sales. It’s ideal for beginners who lack technical knowledge since it comes with pre-built flows, ready-made templates, and plenty of powerful opt-in features.
In terms of WooCommerce inventory management, Omnisend enhances the default functionality with personalized, customer-facing emails for back-in-stock alerts, delivered straight to your customers’ inboxes. You can also launch back-in-stock marketing campaigns, based on your WooCommerce inventory data.
Essentially, Omnisend is the go-to solution for targeting specific customers with relevant product recommendations, discounts, and bundle offers. By tailoring offers to shopper preferences and behavior, you can increase your conversion rate.
You can also send follow-up emails when shoppers have viewed items on your site without making a purchase.
Features
- Over 250 stunning email templates
- Pre-built workflows
- Opt-in tools (popups, signup forms, landing pages)
- A/B split testing
- Performance reports
- Over 130 integrations
- Email and SMS scheduling
- Pre-built segments
- 24/7 support
Price
You can use Omnisend for free for up to 250 contacts and 500 emails per month.
The Standard plan starts at $16/month, which is ideal for medium-sized businesses. Though, larger companies might prefer the Pro package, which starts at $59/month and includes unlimited emails and advanced reporting.
2. ATUM Inventory Management

ATUM is a free WooCommerce inventory management plugin that offers advanced tracking capabilities. It comes with a user-friendly interface where you can edit every aspect of your store inventory and access valuable statistics, including lost sales and inventory levels.
Some functionality is similar to what’s available with WooCommerce’s default system, but ATUM allows you to edit certain product details from the Stock Central page (rather than accessing the dedicated product page). Additionally, you can edit inventory logs to increase product quantities (which isn’t currently possible with the default WooCommerce system).
ATUM also provides extra stock filters, along with weekly and fortnightly sales overviews. You can further extend the plugin using paid add-ons, such as enabling multi-supplier or multi-location tracking, and material building.
Features
- A customizable interface
- Image thumbnails for quick product identification
- Decimal support for stock quantities
- Product locations
- Stock Central direct edits
- Advanced search and filters (including a suppliers column)
- Inventory logs, which allow you to increase stock
- Supplier information
- Editable sales reports (and a Stock Control widget)
Price
ATUM is a free inventory management plugin, but there are eight paid add-ons that cost between $105-$184/year. You can also access a free trial for each of these add-ons before you purchase them.
3. Multi Locations Inventory Management

As the name suggests, this stock management tool enables you to track inventory across multiple locations, so it’s ideal if you run various branches or keep products in different warehouses. It also gives you more control over shipping, payments, and orders across different locations.
Better yet, the plugin automatically detects the closest product location to the customer, and shows the relevant availability and product price for that location. To streamline business operations, you can assign shop managers to different locations.
Like ATUM, you can bulk edit and manage products across all locations from a single screen. You also have the option to combine inventory locations by city, region, or country. For a finer level of control, you can access sublocation features (like the floor and shelf number of a warehouse).
Features
- Delivery area assignment (using WooCommerce Shipping Zones)
- Location-based shipping
- Product suggestions
- A Google Maps store locator
- A “remember visitor location” feature
- Rule-based order fulfillment (including location priority)
- Centralized stock management across multiple locations
Price
WooCommerce Multi Locations Inventory Management costs $99 for a regular license and includes six months of support.
4. Smart Manager

If you’re looking to save time managing your ecommerce inventory, Smart Manager for WooCommerce is an excellent free plugin. It provides a powerful bulk edit menu for products, blog posts, subscriptions, orders, coupons, and more, all within an Excel-style spreadsheet.
It isn’t just basic settings like SKUs, weight, and quantity that you can edit in bulk. You can also change the tax status, shipping class, and gallery images of multiple products at once. This way, you’re able to manage your store more efficiently, compared to the default inventory management process.
Smart Manager comes with advanced search and conditions to help you find products in your inventory much faster. You can also configure emails to be sent to customers when the order status changes, and show or hide data columns to personalize your dashboard view.
Features
- Bulk editing for products, subscriptions, coupons, and more
- A comprehensive stock log, including stock history
- Easy product imports
- Advanced search and filters
- Customizable ecommerce reports
- Email notifications
- A distraction-free mode
- Bulk edit scheduling
Price
Smart Manager for WooCommerce is a free plugin, but there are premium versions available. These start at $199/year.
5. Stock Synchronization for WooCommerce

Stock Synchronization for WooCommerce plugin enables you to update inventory information from an external CSV file. As the name suggests, the tool automatically keeps your stock levels in sync, so you don’t need to manually update product quantities when you receive a shipment.
This addresses one of the biggest limitations of the existing WooCommerce stock management system, which only updates quantities when items get sold. It’s particularly useful if you have a supplier that offers a CSV inventory list.
This WooCommerce stock management plugin isn’t just limited to automatic quantity updates — it also synchronizes your product prices from the same file. Plus, it’s compatible with various spreadsheets and documents, including Google Spreadsheets, Google Drive, Dropbox, and more.
Features
- Automatic product quantity updates
- Automatic product price updates
- Support for variable products
- Support for WPML
- Compatibility with various file types
- External file handling for speed optimization
Price
Stock Synchronization for WooCommerce costs $15 for a regular license.
6. Stock Manager for WooCommerce

Stock Manager enables you to edit, sort, and export products all from one stylish screen. Plus, you can apply advanced quick filters and view your entire inventory history.
This tool is great if you’re used to tracking products with spreadsheets like Microsoft Excel, since you’ll edit stock data using table cells and dropdowns. You can also tailor the dashboard to your business requirements, and you get access to three predefined filters.
A great bonus of the plugin is that it’s completely GDPR-friendly, as it doesn’t collect any personal data from customers. Plus, you can bulk edit attributes, regular prices, sales prices, backorders, and more.
But if you want to bulk edit coupons and orders too, you’ll be better off with the Smart Manager plugin that we discussed above (and which is run by the same company, StoreApps).
This plugin is free, so its functionality may be a bit limited. But you can easily integrate it with other tools by StoreApps, including the WooCommerce Bulk Variations Manager and Offermative (for upsells and cross-sells, and automated discounts).
Features
- Centralized stock and variation management
- Stock history
- Advanced quick filters
- Pre-defined search filters
- A customizable dashboard
- Product thumbnail images
- CSV file imports and exports
- GDPR-ready functionality
Price
Stock Manager for WooCommerce is a free plugin.
7. Katana

We discussed earlier that a huge limitation of the default WooCommerce stock tracking system is that you’re unable to track raw materials. If that is an essential function for managing your inventory, Katana is the tool for you.
With Katana, you can quickly find out if/when you need to place orders with your suppliers to maintain ongoing production. Better yet, you can store all your bills of materials (BOMs) in a central location which makes them easy to find in the future.
Katana bridges another gap in the default WooCommerce management process. You can synchronize stock across multiple warehouses and store locations, instead of only being able to track inventory across your business as a whole.
What’s more, Katana integrates with tons of useful tools and platforms, which makes it easy to slot into your existing workflow. Besides WooCommerce, you can connect the tool to accounting software like QuickBooks, shipping services like ShipStation, and CRM platforms like HubSpot.
Features
- Raw material inventory tracking
- Multi-location inventory management
- Production task scheduling for employees
- Sales performance tracking
- Order tracking across various sales channels
- Reorder reminder triggers
- Add-ons and integrations
- Live chat support
Price
The Starter plan costs $179/year, and there are two additional plans: Standard and Professional. These cost $359/year and $799/year respectively.
8. WooCommerce Attribute Stock

WooCommerce provides basic ecommerce inventory management, which tends to be sufficient if you’re only selling simple products. But with WooCommerce Attribute Stock, you can share stock between multiple products, track attributes, and deduct variable amounts of stock quantities.
This makes it one of the best WooCommerce inventory management plugins for selling product bundles or serving niche markets. For example, if you sell jewelry, you might need a way to separately track product parts, such as chains or pendants, separately from finished products.
This way, stock levels will automatically reflect the change, making the finished product unavailable if, for instance, a chain or pendant sells out. This provides much more flexibility than the default system. Plus, you can attribute stock per sale with stock multipliers, which is handy if you deal with packs or measurements.
Features
- Inventory sharing between multiple products and variations
- Measurement/component tracking
- Attribute-based stock management
- Customizable configurations
- CSV import/export
- A user-friendly dashboard
- Stock multipliers, which let you define how much stock to deduct per purchase
Price
There is a Lite version available, which you can install for free, or, you can purchase a regular license for $39, which includes six months of support.
9. WooCommerce Out of Stock! Manager

Compared to the default inventory management system, this plugin gives you far more control over stock status. Not only can you view and edit all inventory values from one dashboard, but you can also create low stock threshold rules.
Now, you’re probably thinking: doesn’t the existing system already let you do this? Technically yes, but what’s special about this plugin is that you can also assign custom low stock warning values to your products, product categories, and variations.
You’ll be able to customize the “in stock” and “out of stock” text in real time, directly on the product listing page. You can also set up notification emails (for multiple recipients) when product stock nears the low stock threshold. This helps you avoid completely selling out of items.
Features
- Custom low stock threshold values
- Default warning values for products and variations
- Instant email notifications
- Multiple email recipients
- A handy dashboard widget
- Custom product page text for in stock and out of stock items
- WPML integration for translations
Price
You can purchase the WooCommerce Out of Stock! Manager for $29 for a regular license. This includes six months of support.
Extend and enhance WooCommerce inventory management
WooCommerce facilitates easy product inventory management and tracking, but there are some drawbacks to relying solely on the default system. For instance, you’re unable to monitor inventory across multiple locations, nor can you track raw materials.
Therefore, it’s a good idea to supplement the base functionality with advanced plugins and extensions. One of the best tools for the job is Omnisend, which lets you automatically send back-in-stock notifications to your customers. Its segmentation feature also lets you set up personalized campaigns based on inventory data.
With Omnisend, you can target specific shoppers with product recommendations and relevant discounts to improve conversions. Check out plans today!
TABLE OF CONTENTS
No fluff, no spam, no corporate filler. Just a friendly letter, twice a month.