Documentation

What is Inventory Genius?

Inventory Genius is an inventory management app for Shopify that brings demand forecasting, purchase order management, supplier tracking, and multi-location intelligence into a single application.

It connects directly to your Shopify store, syncs your products, orders, and inventory in real time, then uses your sales history to forecast demand, generate reorder suggestions, and keep your supply chain running smoothly.

Core capabilities

• Real-time inventory tracking across all locations
• Statistical demand forecasting with multiple methods
• Automated reorder suggestions based on rate of sale
• Full purchase order lifecycle management
• Supplier directory with performance tracking
• ABC-XYZ product categorisation
• Bundle and kit management with component tracking
• Multi-location inventory, forecasts, and transfers
• Historical data analysis with seasonal detection
• CSV exports and reporting

Requirements

Shopify Store

• An active Shopify store on any plan (Basic, Shopify, Advanced, or Plus)
• At least one active product with sales history for forecasting to work effectively

Shopify permissions

When you install Inventory Genius, the app requests the following permissions from your Shopify store:

Browser

• Any modern browser (Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Edge)
• Desktop recommended for full grid and analytics features; mobile-responsive views available

Getting started

Step 1 — Install from Shopify

Find Inventory Genius in the Shopify App Store and click Install. You'll be prompted to approve the permissions listed above, then redirected to confirm your subscription.

Step 2 — Automatic onboarding

Once installed, Inventory Genius runs a multi-phase onboarding process automatically. You'll see a progress screen tracking each phase in real time.

Phase 1 — Data Sync

• Your product catalogue, variants, and SKUs are imported
• Recent orders (90 days) and line items are pulled in
• Current inventory levels across all locations are synced
• Shopify webhooks are registered for real-time updates going forward

Phase 2 — Demand Analysis

• Promotional and discount periods are detected
• Daily sales records are built from your order history
• Demand normalisation runs to clean the data (out-of-stock periods, anomalous spikes, promotional effects)
• Seasonal patterns are identified

Phase 3 — Historical Deep Dive (runs in background)

• Extended order history (2+ years) is pulled for deeper seasonal analysis
• Demand normalisation is refined with the fuller dataset

Phase 4 — Forecasting & Intelligence

• Demand forecasts are generated for every active variant and location
• Initial reorder suggestions are created
• Organisation-level metrics and KPIs are calculated
• Product bundles are auto-detected from your catalogue

The entire process typically completes within a few minutes, depending on the size of your catalogue and order history.

Step 3 — Upload historical purchase orders (optional)

For the most accurate inventory backfill and rate-of-sale calculations, you can upload a CSV of your past purchase orders. This is optional but recommended, especially if you've been operating for a while.

Step 4 — Explore your dashboard

Once onboarding completes, you're taken to your dashboard with live metrics, priority actions, and full access to all features.

Dashboard

The dashboard gives you an at-a-glance view of your inventory health, supply chain status, and priority actions.

Business metrics

• Total Inventory Value — the dollar value of all stock on hand.
• Monthly Sales Run Rate — your current monthly sales velocity.
• Pending PO Value — total value of open purchase orders.
• Inventory Days Supply — how many days your current stock will last at the current rate of sale.
• Cash Conversion Cycle — days between paying for stock and receiving payment from customers.
• Average Supplier Lead Time — mean delivery time across your suppliers.

Inventory health

• Total active products tracked
• Low stock count — products approaching their reorder point
• Out of stock count — products with zero available inventory
• Stockout risk — projections for 7-day and 30-day stockout risk
• Coverage ratio — days of supply across your catalogue

Supply chain pipeline

• Urgent reorders needed — products flagged as critical or urgent
• Late purchase orders — POs past their expected delivery date
• Ready to receive — POs that have arrived and need processing
• In transit — POs currently on their way with estimated arrival dates
• Supplier fulfillment rate — percentage of orders delivered on time

Priority action cards

The dashboard highlights the most important actions you need to take right now: critical reorders, late POs, ready-to-receive shipments, and 7-day stockout-risk products. All dashboard metrics auto-refresh every 30 seconds.

Location-specific views

If you operate multiple locations, use the location selector to filter the entire dashboard to a single warehouse, store, or fulfillment centre.

Inventory management

Inventory grid

Your full product catalogue is displayed in a sortable, filterable grid.

Search & filter

• Full-text search across product names, SKUs, and barcodes
• Filter by location, ABC category, XYZ classification, supplier, stock status, or product type
• Multi-column sorting
• Column visibility controls to show only the data you care about

Stats cards

Above the grid, summary cards show total products, total inventory value, low stock count, and out of stock count, updated as you filter.

Bulk actions

• Create a purchase order for the selection
• Add selected items to a bundle
• Export the selection to CSV

Supplier urgency panel

A sidebar panel lists suppliers with products at risk, colour-coded by urgency. Click a supplier to filter the grid to their products.

Product detail page

Click any product to open its detail view with multiple tabs:

• Operational — product image, name, SKU, barcode, stock by location, sales velocity, reorder point, safety stock, days of supply, ABC/XYZ.
• History — sales-trend charts (30/60/90 days), stock-level history, forecast-accuracy tracking, historical forecast comparison.
• Supplier — associated suppliers with lead times, MOQ, and cost per supplier.
• Purchase Orders — related POs with status and receiving history.
• Forecast — current forecast, method used, accuracy score, breakdown by method.
• Seasonal — detected seasonal factors and holiday effects.

Real-time sync

Inventory levels stay in sync with Shopify through three layers: webhooks for immediate updates, a daily reconciliation job to catch any missed events, and a periodic full reconciliation that detects and corrects discrepancies and flags phantom stock.

Demand forecasting

Inventory Genius forecasts demand using a robust statistical method tuned to your store's sales pattern.

Methods

• Robust Rate of Sale (ROS) — the primary forecasting method. Trimmed mean of daily sales with MAD-based confidence intervals. Handles outliers automatically.
• MIN/MAX fallback — used when there isn't enough historical data for statistical methods.

How forecasts work

1. Your sales history is cleaned through the demand-normalisation pipeline (out-of-stock periods excluded, anomalous spikes capped, promotional effects separated).
2. The forecasting method runs against the cleaned data.
3. Accuracy is measured against recent actuals.
4. Forecasts are generated for your configured look-ahead period (7–52 weeks).
5. Confidence intervals (typically 95%) are calculated around each forecast.

Demand normalisation

Before forecasting, raw sales data goes through a cleaning pipeline:

• Out-of-stock detection — periods where you had zero sales because you had zero stock are excluded.
• Spike detection — anomalous demand spikes are capped.
• Promotional adjustment — promotional demand is separated from baseline demand.
• Sales-exclusion rules — returns, adjustments, and other non-demand events are filtered out.

The result is a clean demand signal that produces significantly more accurate forecasts.

Order suggestions & reorder points

Smart reorder points

Inventory Genius automatically calculates minimum and maximum stock levels for every product at every location:

• Minimum stock (reorder point) = lead-time demand + safety stock.
• Maximum stock = based on economic order quantity (EOQ).
• Safety stock = configurable by ABC category (higher for more important products).
• Lead-time factor = uses supplier-specific lead times.

These are calculated per variant, per location, and update automatically as your demand patterns change.

Order suggestions

• Products below their reorder point are flagged.
• Suggestions are grouped by supplier for consolidated ordering.
• Minimum order quantities (MOQ) are respected.
• Lead times are factored in for just-in-time ordering.
• Suggested quantities balance holding cost against stockout risk.

Urgency levels

Purchase orders

Creating a purchase order

1. Select a supplier and destination location.
2. Search and add products by name, SKU, or barcode.
3. Quantities and unit costs are pre-filled from supplier history (editable).
4. Set the expected delivery date.
5. Add internal notes or supplier-facing notes.
6. Save as draft or submit.

PO status tracking

Multi-currency support

• Currency selection per PO
• Exchange-rate tracking
• Shipping and duty cost fields
• Landed cost calculation
• Exchange-rate history for audit

Receiving workflow

1. Open the purchase order and click Receive.
2. Enter the quantity received for each line item (barcode scanning supported).
3. Note any discrepancies (damaged items, short shipments).
4. Confirm receipt.
5. Inventory is updated in real time across your locations.

Partial receiving is fully supported — receive what's arrived and keep the PO open for the remainder.

Sending POs to suppliers

Purchase orders can be emailed directly to your supplier from within the app, pre-formatted with line items, quantities, pricing, and delivery details.

Supplier management

Supplier directory

• Company name, contact person, email, phone, website
• Product categories they supply
• Default lead time (days from order to delivery)
• Minimum order quantity (MOQ)
• Payment terms

Supplier detail page

• Contact information — all contact details at a glance.
• Product catalogue — every product you source from this supplier.
• Performance metrics — on-time delivery rate, average lead time, quality rating, total lifetime orders, total spend.
• Recent orders — purchase-order history with status.
• Notes — relationship notes and history.

Product–supplier mapping

• Each product can have multiple suppliers (primary and secondary).
• Cost, lead time, and MOQ can be set per supplier per product.
• Volume-discount tiers are supported.
• Products without an assigned supplier are flagged for attention.

Multi-location support

Location management

Inventory Genius supports all your Shopify locations — warehouses, fulfillment centres, retail stores, and satellite locations. Each location gets its own:

• Inventory levels per product
• Min/max stock settings
• Location-specific demand forecasts
• Location-specific metrics and KPIs

Transfer orders

1. Select a source and destination location.
2. Choose products and quantities to transfer.
3. Set an expected delivery date.
4. Track the transfer through Draft, In Transit, and Received statuses.
5. Receive at the destination with the same receiving workflow as purchase orders.

Transfer suggestions

• Excess stock at one location paired with shortages at another
• Transfer cost considerations
• One-click transfer creation from suggestions

Location comparison

Compare performance across locations with side-by-side views of stock levels and inventory value, stock turn rate, coverage ratio, stockout risk, and shrinkage/discrepancy rates.

ABC–XYZ categorisation

ABC analysis (revenue value)

ABC classification is based on 90-day sales value and recalculates automatically.

XYZ analysis (demand variability)

The ABC–XYZ matrix

Click any segment in the matrix view to drill into the products within it.

Bundles & kits

Creating bundles

1. Give the bundle a name, SKU, and optional barcode.
2. Add component products and specify the quantity of each per bundle.
3. Set the bundle price and cost.
4. Activate the bundle.

How bundle inventory works

Bundle availability is automatically calculated from its components. If a bundle contains 2× Product A and 1× Product B, the available bundle quantity is the minimum of (Product A stock ÷ 2) and (Product B stock ÷ 1). When a bundle sells, component inventory is decremented accordingly.

Bundle management

• View all bundles with search and filtering
• Edit bundle composition at any time
• See bundle sales history and profit margins
• Deactivate or delete bundles
• AI-assisted bundle description generation
• AI-generated bundle image, composed from the component products' images

Cost management

Cost tracking

• COGS (Cost of Goods Sold) — the purchase cost per unit.
• Weighted Average Cost (WAC) — time-weighted average cost across all purchases.
• Landed cost — including shipping and duty.
• Currency conversion — multi-currency cost tracking with exchange-rate history.

Cost adjustments

• Purchase order receiving (costs update automatically with each PO)
• Manual unit-cost adjustments
• Bulk percentage adjustments across a category
• Exchange-rate adjustments for multi-currency operations
• WAC recalculation

Tax rates

• Set a default tax rate for your organisation
• Override tax rates per product or per location
• Tax-rate history tracking
• Automatic tax-rate sync from Shopify

Forecast overrides

When you know something the algorithm doesn't (an upcoming promotion, a product launch, a supply disruption), you can override forecasts at multiple levels.

Override hierarchy

1. Variant level — override a single SKU.
2. Product level — apply to all variants of a product.
3. Category level — apply across an entire product category.
4. Vendor level — apply to all products from a supplier.
5. Global level — organisation-wide override.

Override types

Approval workflow

Large deviations (over 30% change) can be configured to require manager approval before taking effect. Override history is maintained for audit purposes.

Seasonal analysis

Automatic detection

Inventory Genius analyses your sales history to detect seasonal patterns (recurring demand cycles such as summer/winter, holiday seasons), holiday effects (Black Friday, Christmas, Valentine's Day), and promotional periods (past promotions and their demand impact).

How it works

The system uses STL decomposition to separate your sales data into three components: trend (underlying growth or decline), seasonal (recurring patterns that repeat each year), and residual (random variation).

What you see

• An interactive calendar highlighting seasonal peaks and troughs
• Seasonal effect charts (e.g., "November demand is typically 25% above baseline")
• Holiday impact attribution (e.g., "Black Friday week accounts for 8% of annual demand")
• Pattern-strength scores so you know how reliable each seasonal pattern is
• Seasonal factors automatically applied to your forecasts

Analytics & reporting

Built-in analytics

Sales analytics

• Daily, weekly, and monthly sales trends
• Sales by product, category, supplier, or location
• Top and bottom performing products
• Sales velocity (units/day, dollars/day)

Inventory analytics

• Current stock by location
• Average inventory levels
• Inventory value by category
• Stock turn rate (inventory turns per year)
• Days of supply
• Stockout-risk projections (7-day, 30-day, 90-day)
• Slow-moving and dead stock identification

CSV exports

• Inventory export — products, SKUs, stock levels, categories, costs, forecasts, reorder points.
• Purchase orders export — PO numbers, suppliers, line items, amounts, statuses, dates.
• Sales export — daily sales by product with revenue and unit breakdowns.

Team & permissions

Inviting team members

Invite colleagues by email from the Settings page. Each invited user receives a link to create their account and join your organisation.

Roles

Organisation switching

If a user belongs to multiple organisations, they can switch between them from the navigation menu.

Settings & configuration

Organisation settings

• Organisation name, time zone, and currency
• Address and tax settings

Forecasting settings

• Default forecast-method preference
• Forecast look-ahead period (7–52 weeks)
• Confidence-interval percentage
• Minimum history required for statistical methods
• Seasonal-adjustment toggle

Reorder settings

• Default reorder point (days of supply)
• Default safety-stock factor
• ABC-categorisation thresholds (customise the A/B/C boundaries)
• Per-location min/max overrides

Webhook status

View all registered Shopify webhooks with their current status (active/error). Includes manual registration and health-check tools if issues arise.

Pricing

Inventory Genius pricing is based on your Shopify plan. All plans include the full feature set with unlimited SKUs, unlimited locations, and the full level of support. Every plan starts with a 14-day free trial.

What's included on every plan

• Unlimited products and SKUs
• Unlimited locations
• Statistical demand forecasting
• Order suggestions and smart reorder points
• Full purchase-order management
• Supplier directory and performance tracking
• ABC-XYZ categorisation
• Bundle and kit management
• Multi-location inventory and transfers
• Seasonal analysis and demand normalisation
• Forecast overrides with approval workflow
• Multi-currency support
• CSV exports
• Team collaboration with role-based permissions
• Real-time Shopify sync via webhooks

Billing

Billing is handled entirely through Shopify. Your subscription appears on your regular Shopify invoice — no separate payment method required. You can manage or cancel your subscription at any time through the app or your Shopify admin.

Data & privacy

What data we access

Inventory Genius only accesses the Shopify data necessary to provide its features (products, orders, inventory levels, locations, and fulfillments). We do not access customer personal data, payment information, or storefront content.

Data security

• All data is encrypted in transit (TLS) and at rest
• Sensitive credentials are encrypted with a dedicated encryption key
• Authentication is handled with JWT tokens
• Multi-tenant isolation ensures your data is completely separate from other organisations

GDPR compliance

• We respond to Shopify customer-data requests (access, deletion, redaction)
• User data can be deleted on request
• Data anonymisation is supported
• Shop-data redaction is handled automatically on app uninstall

FAQ

How long does setup take?

The initial onboarding process typically takes 2–10 minutes depending on the size of your catalogue and order history. You can start using the app as soon as Phase 1 (Data Sync) completes.

Do I need to manually enter my products?

No. Everything is imported automatically from your Shopify store during onboarding.

How far back does the forecasting look?

The system pulls up to 2+ years of order history for seasonal analysis. For day-to-day rate-of-sale calculations, it typically uses the most recent 90 days.

What happens if I add a new product in Shopify?

It syncs automatically via webhooks within seconds. No manual action needed.

Can I use Inventory Genius with multiple Shopify stores?

Each Shopify store is set up as a separate organisation. Team members can belong to multiple organisations and switch between them.

What if my forecasts don't look right?

You can override any forecast at the variant, product, category, vendor, or global level.

Can I import my existing purchase-order history?

Yes. During onboarding (or any time after), you can upload a CSV of historical purchase orders to improve inventory backfill and rate-of-sale calculations.

What happens if I uninstall the app?

Your Shopify subscription is automatically cancelled. Your data is retained for 30 days in case you reinstall. After 30 days, data is permanently deleted per our retention policy.

Does Inventory Genius write back to my Shopify store?

Only in two cases: (1) updating inventory levels when you receive a purchase order, and (2) syncing weighted average cost back to product cost fields. It never modifies your product listings, prices, descriptions, or storefront.

How do I get help?

Full support is included on every plan — email support@inventory-genius.com any time.