Magento 2 Inventory Reports: What's missing natively & How to fix

Magento 2 comes with a solid set of reports for sales, customers, and marketing. But if you’ve ever tried to answer a simple question like “which of my warehouses is running low on my top sellers this week?” — you’ve likely hit a wall.

Inventory reporting is the one area where Magento’s native report suite falls consistently short. And for most merchants, it’s also the area where a blind spot is most expensive: stockouts lose sales, overstock ties up cash, and dead stock quietly erodes margin.

This guide focuses on the four inventory report types every Magento 2 merchant needs, what the platform can’t give you natively, and how to get that data without building a custom solution from scratch.

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What Are Inventory Reports & Why Are They Essential?

An inventory report is a structured view of your stock data; such as quantities on hand, stock value, product movement, and availability, at any given point in time. Unlike sales reports, which tell you what already happened, inventory reports tell you what’s happening right now and what’s likely to happen next.

For Magento 2 merchants, this distinction matters more than it might seem:

• Stockouts are more costly than most merchants estimate: Studies show that 21–43% of customers will go to a competitor when they find an item out of stock — taking that purchase, and potentially future ones, with them.
• Overstock carries its own cost: Excess inventory ties up working capital, increases storage costs, and ages into dead stock that’s harder to move at full margin.
• Reordering is no longer guesswork: Knowing when to reorder, how much, and for which warehouse requires real-time stock data, not a weekly manual count.

Types of Magento 2 inventory reports

Magento 2 has no dedicated inventory report section. What it does have is a single Low Stock report under Reports → Products → Low Stock — one global threshold, no filters, no export options worth mentioning. Everything else requires manual data pulling and spreadsheet work.

Here’s what you actually need, what native Magento can’t give you, and how to get it.

Inventory On Hand (by Source)

Magento’s product grid shows qty per SKU, but it’s aggregated across all sources. If you’re running multiple warehouses, you have to dig into each product individually.

What you need: A report that shows current stock levels broken down by source, with total stock value (qty × cost) per SKU.

How to get it: In Mageplaza Advanced Reports, navigate to Stock → Inventory Stock Report. Filter by source, product category, or store view. Export to CSV for your purchasing or finance team. What would take 30 minutes of manual exporting takes seconds.

Low Stock (Custom Threshold per SKU/Category)

Native gap: The native Low Stock report applies one global threshold — set under Stores → Configuration → Catalog → Inventory. A merchant selling both fast-moving consumables and slow-moving furniture gets the same warning threshold for both. The result: either too much noise or too little warning, depending on which product type you optimized for.

What you need: Configurable thresholds per product or category, with the ability to filter by source so you know which warehouse is running low — not just that a SKU is low somewhere across your network.

How to get it: Mageplaza Advanced Reports → Product → Low Stock Report. Set a custom qty threshold at report run time, filter by category and store view, and export the result directly to your purchasing team’s workflow.

Product Velocity & Days on Hand

Magento’s Bestsellers report (Reports → Products → Bestsellers) tells you what sold, but not how fast, and not how much runway you have left. Knowing a SKU is your top seller is useless if you don’t know how many days the stock remains.

What you need: Units sold per day (velocity) crossed against current stock to produce a days-on-hand figure per SKU. This is the number that actually drives reorder timing.

How to get it: In Mageplaza Advanced Reports, cross-reference the Bestseller Report (units sold over a date range) with current stock levels from the Inventory Stock Report. Divide current qty by average daily units sold to get your days-on-hand estimate. Set your date range to match your typical supplier lead time — if your supplier takes 14 days to deliver, any SKU under 14 days on hand needs an immediate reorder trigger.

Dead Stock (No Movement in 30/60/90 Days)

There is no native report that surfaces products with zero or near-zero sales over a configurable period. Dead stock silently accumulates, tying up cash and warehouse space, until someone manually notices or does a physical count.

What you need: A report that flags SKUs with no sales movement within a defined window — 30, 60, or 90 days — ranked by current stock value so you can prioritize which dead stock is costing you the most.

How to get it: In Mageplaza Advanced Reports, use the Product Reports section filtered by a custom date range with units sold = 0 or near zero, sorted by stock value descending. This immediately surfaces your highest-value dead stock — the items worth discounting or liquidating first.

Adobe’s built-in Business Intelligence tool offers some dead stock visibility for Commerce (cloud) merchants — see Magento 2 Advanced Reporting guide for what that covers and where it still falls short.

From Report to Action

A report that doesn’t trigger a decision is just noise. Here’s how each report type connects to a concrete next step — and which Mageplaza extensions automate that response:

Get Started with Advanced Reports

Mageplaza Advanced Reports for Magento 2 covers all four inventory report types above — with flexible filters, visual charts, and CSV export — directly inside your Magento Admin. No external BI tool, no manual spreadsheet work.

If inventory blind spots are costing you stockouts, overstock, or dead stock write-offs, this is the most direct fix available for Magento 2 stores.

How to create the best inventory reports for your Magento store?

Now that you have understood what types of reports are included in Magento 2 and why do businesses need inventory reports, we will provide some tips to make the most out of the reporting function on Magento.

Integrate useful technology

Our first advice is to implement suitable technology. Many businesses are now choosing a point-of-sale (POS) system with inventory features. With a POS, businesses can easily monitor inventory changes and export useful reports, thus reducing manual work. A POS system can be also beneficial for multi-store and multi-warehouse management.

As one of the leading POS providers, ConnectPOS offers excellent solutions for retailers on Magento, including inventory management tools and auto-generated inventory reports. It has been well-known for real-time synchronization between multiple stores and warehouses.

In addition, businesses can also integrate inventory report extensions with advanced and customizable options. In this case, Magento 2 Reports extension from Mageplaza can be a good choice due to the customization and flexible charts or filters.

Be transparent about the number

Accuracy should be a priority in inventory reporting, so that business owners can come up with the appropriate order and plan in the future. Therefore, it is essential to be transparent about the number in your report. This applies to the number of items available in your stores/warehouses or the performance of inventory. Make sure to understand how you’ve come to the final number and make it clear to your colleagues as much as possible.

Train your staff to optimize the report

Unless you are running a one-person business, it is crucial that your employees know how to make the most use of inventory reporting. Because inventory has a very close connection with products, businesses should first make sure that the staff gets acquainted with the selling items. This is not limited to the features, but should also include customers’ purchasing patterns or shelf life of each product. By doing so, employees can have a better understanding of inventory reports and derive appropriate takeaways from them.

If you have the technology to support inventory reporting on Magento, make sure your staff knows how to use it. Selecting the right type of report, comprehending the numbers, or informing customers about inventory stock information are some tasks that employees should be familiar with. Keep in mind that excellent inventory management tools can still be wasted if they are not used correctly by humans.

Make it recurring

As stocks can change rapidly, businesses should generate inventory reports frequently to stay up-to-date with the inventory status. How often should businesses make inventory reports?

The answer is: It depends on the people using it. While the marketing team may need a weekly report to see the effectiveness of their strategy, other departments might only generate monthly reports to review the overall performance.

Apart from that, businesses should also analyze reports after busy selling periods and watch the period-over-period growth (e.g., Christmas 2020 and Christmas 2021). Moreover, the frequency of inventory reporting also depends on specific business operations. For example, you should generate reports more frequently if you order items on a daily basis.

Keep track of the hot stocks

Inventory reports show information about best-sellers, and there is no reason for businesses to not make use of such valuable data. Keeping track of the hot stocks helps store owners to better forecast the stock-out time and quantities of the next order. About this situation, COVID-19 and a sudden demand for hand sanitizers can be a prime example.

Moreover, a survey shows that 34% of businesses have delivered an order late, because they unintentionally sold an out-of-stock item. Although no business wants this situation to happen, they sometimes cannot avoid it. This may stem from the fact that they underestimated the customers’ demands. Therefore, knowing the hot stocks can minimize this situation and remind businesses to restock on time.

Don’t forget your dead stocks

It is always beneficial to look at both ends of the spectrum. In addition to hot stocks, don’t forget your dead stock - the unsellable goods which have stayed in your warehouse for a long period of time. Dead stock (e.g., expired food or leftover seasonal products) can ultimately lead to increased holding costs and additional effort in re-organizing the warehouse.

To solve this problem, an inventory report reminds you of how many dead stocks you have and identifies patterns in customers’ purchases. Based on that, you can make timely decisions about how to process dead stocks and avoid over-ordering these product types in the future.

Reports for Magento 2

Implement deeper analysis - Make better decisions with effective advanced statistic reports

(23 reviews)

Check it out!

Moreover, to maximize inventory management efficiency and cater to your specific needs as your Magento 2 store scales, it is crucial to find the right partner.

Mageplaza, an experienced Magento web design and development agency, can help you to optimize your inventory operations, management and even more. We have collaborated with eCommerce stores of all sizes and industries, crafting customized Magento sites that are user-friendly for both businesses and customers.

Schedule a consultation with our team to meet our Magento 2 experts and discover how we can elevate your brand.

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FAQs

Why does my inventory report show qty > 0 but the product still shows Out of Stock?

This is almost always a reservation system issue. Magento MSI creates a reservation at order placement and only deducts physical qty when a shipment is created, meaning your on-hand qty and your available-to-sell qty are two different numbers.

I have multiple warehouses. How do I get per-source inventory reports?

The report types covered in this article all support source-level filtering, but the data is only meaningful if your warehouse structure is correctly configured first.

How often should I run inventory reports?

It depends on your sales velocity and reorder cycles. As a baseline: low stock and velocity reports should run weekly, dead stock reports monthly, and inventory valuation reports quarterly. During peak seasons or after promotions, run them immediately after the event to catch imbalances before they compound.

Why is my inventory data inconsistent across different Magento reports?

You might pull stock numbers from the product grid, the Low Stock report, and a third-party integration, and get three different figures. The root cause is usually that different parts of Magento read inventory differently: some read physical qty, some read salable qty (after reservations), and some read from cached index tables that haven’t been refreshed.

Running a full reindex (System → Index Management → Reindex All) resolves stale data, but the longer-term fix is consolidating your inventory reporting into a single source (like Mageplaza Magento 2 Advanced Reports).

Does Magento 2’s built-in Advanced Reporting cover inventory?

Partially. Adobe’s native Advanced Reporting (available on Commerce plans) covers some product and order data, but it has significant gaps on the inventory side, such as no per-source breakdown, no dead stock detection, no days-on-hand calculation.

Wrapping up

This article has just provided everything you need to know about inventory reports for your Magento 2 store.

With the ever-changing eCommerce landscape and increasing customer demands, having real-time insights into stock levels, product availability, and sales performance is essential.

Therefore, make the most of Magento 2 Inventory Reports to optimize your operations, inventory management, and product offerings. This way, you can update your inventory instantly and personalize customer care.