Stock Reserve & Reorder for WooCommerce — physical stock, reserved orders and a reorder point

Stock Reserve & Reorder for WooCommerce shows three figures instead of one: how much of a product is physically on the shelf, how much of it is reserved by orders that are paid but not shipped yet, and how much is available to sell. Deliveries are booked as a document that adds “+N” to the current stock, and the reorder point is worked out from the sales rate and the supplier’s lead time.

WooCommerce takes stock the moment an order is paid or put on hold. The box is still on the shelf until the parcel leaves, but the stock figure no longer shows it. So a stock count never matches, and nobody can say how much is already promised to customers. The low-stock e-mail fires at a fixed number — the same for a supplier who delivers in three days and one who needs four weeks. And a delivery typed into the Stock field overwrites whatever orders changed while you were counting boxes.

The plugin adds the light warehouse layer a small shop is missing — without an ERP and without changing how WooCommerce takes stock.

There is a separate version for OpenCart: Stock Reserve & Reorder for OpenCart.

What the buyer sees

Nothing new — on purpose. The plugin works in the admin and does not change how WooCommerce holds and takes stock at checkout: the classic and the block checkout work as before. The buyer feels the result indirectly: you spot a product that needs reordering before it runs out, and a delivery booked while orders keep coming does not oversell what is already gone.

What the admin gets

• Stock overview — WooCommerce → Stock & Reorder. For every product and variation that manages stock: physical, reserved, available, expected, sold per day, days left, reorder point, “order by” and a status (“Out of stock”, “Reorder now”, “OK”, “No sales”). The most urgent come first; filters, search by name or SKU, sorting.
• Physical = WooCommerce stock + reserved. Reserved are the units of orders in the statuses you mark as “paid, not shipped yet” (Processing and On hold by default; add your own status such as “Packing”, or Completed if that is how you mark packed orders).
• In checkout — units WooCommerce holds for unpaid checkouts, shown separately under “Available”.
• Partial shipments leave the reserve: partial shipments of WooCommerce Order Fulfillments and Shiptastic / Germanized, and refunds without restock.

• Reserved orders — clicking the reserved figure opens the orders holding the product, with the quantity for each.

• Receive goods — a goods receipt: document number, supplier, note, any number of lines with product search. Or paste a “SKU quantity” list straight from a spreadsheet — separated by a space, tab, comma or semicolon.
• “+N”, not overwrite. Every line is added to the current stock in one relative database update through WooCommerce’s own function, so orders placed while you were filling in the form are not lost. The same form submitted twice is booked once. An unknown SKU — nothing is booked and the form comes back filled in.
• Quick “+N” on every row of the overview — for a single box without a document.

• Receipts — the delivery history: received, expected, cancelled. A receipt booked by mistake is cancelled with a button — the plugin takes off exactly what it added, relative to the current stock.

• Products list column: “Physical 42 · reserved 4 · Reorder” under the usual stock figure. Next to the menu item — the number of products to reorder.
• Lead time and safety stock — in the Inventory tab of the product and of every variation; a variation without its own values takes the parent’s, a product without values takes the store defaults. Safety stock in units on the product, or in days of sales by default.

• Pro: suggested order quantity — sales during the lead time plus “an order should cover N days”, plus safety stock, minus available and expected; rounded up to the pack size and the supplier’s minimum order.
• Pro: suppliers per product and variation, the purchase list by supplier as CSV, and an expected delivery from a supplier’s suggestions in one click.
• Pro: expected deliveries. A delivery booked ahead counts as incoming in the reorder maths. When it arrives, adjust the quantities and book it; the missing units can stay expected.
• Pro: CSV — receipt lines from a file (UTF-8 or Windows-1252), overview export; formula injection protection for Excel.

• Pro: reorder digest — daily or weekly at a set hour, by e-mail and to Telegram (one or several chats): what to reorder, by when and how much, plus products whose whole shelf is promised to orders. A “Send the digest now” button for testing.

How it works — step by step

1. Install the plugin and open WooCommerce → Stock & Reorder. The overview lists every product and variation that manages stock right away.
2. On every order line WooCommerce records how many units it took from stock. Cancelling the order gives them back, a refund with restock lowers the figure. The plugin sums it for orders in the reserved statuses and takes off whatever already left with a partial shipment or was refunded without restock.
3. Physical = WooCommerce stock + reserved; available = WooCommerce stock.
4. The sales rate counts the same units for orders of the last N days (30 by default), so cancelled orders and restocked refunds are not sales. A product younger than the window is measured over its own age.
5. Reorder point = sold per day × lead time + safety stock. When available plus expected falls to it, the product gets “Reorder now”, an “order by” date and the days of stock left.
6. The goods arrive — a receipt adds “+N”. A mistake — cancelling takes off exactly as much.

On a test catalogue of 20,000 products and variations the overview opens in 0.7 s with 12,000 orders in the last 60 days and in 1.7 s with 52,000 — on MariaDB 10.11 and MySQL 8.0. Sales of the whole catalogue are cached for 10 minutes for the Products list and the product screen; reserved stock is always read live.

Under the hood

• Reserved stock comes from WooCommerce’s own data: the _reduced_stock meta of order lines, which WooCommerce writes when it takes stock and lowers on cancellation and on a refund with restock. The plugin writes nothing to orders and does not change how WooCommerce takes stock.
• The stock owner is the same as in WooCommerce: a variation with its own stock, or the parent product when stock is kept on it.
• Receipts are relative updates through wc_update_product_stock() with the increase operation, not a new figure written over the old one. A form token stops the same form from being booked twice; parallel cancels and bookings were tested with simultaneous processes — exactly one goes through.
• Own tables for receipts; on products, only the lead time and safety stock meta.
• Reserved stock is read from open orders only using the status index, so the product screen and the Products list stay fast on a long order history.
• Uninstall: without the “Also delete” tick the data stays; with it the plugin removes its tables, meta and settings. Product stock never changes either way.

How to install

1. Plugins → Add New → Upload Plugin: choose catcode-stock-reserve-reorder-for-woocommerce-free-1.0.1.zip and activate. WooCommerce must be active, with stock management on.
2. Open WooCommerce → Stock & Reorder — the overview lists every product that manages stock straight away.
3. In Settings, check which order statuses mean “paid, not shipped yet”, and set the default lead time and safety stock.
4. For products whose supplier is faster or slower, set a lead time in the Inventory tab of the product or the variation.
5. For Pro: upload the Pro build over the free one (WordPress offers to replace the installed version) and paste the licence key from the e-mail in Settings — or press “Try Pro for 7 days” there.