I Built a WooCommerce Inventory Forecasting Plugin — Self-Hosted, No Monthly Fees

#woocommerce #wordpress #php #opensource

After months of development, I just launched StockPulse — a WooCommerce plugin that turns your order history into an inventory intelligence system.

The problem I was solving

Running a WooCommerce store means constantly answering questions like:

"How many days of stock do I have left for each product?"
"When should I reorder before I run out?"
"Which products have been sitting in my warehouse for 60+ days with zero sales?"

The existing solutions are either expensive SaaS tools ($49–199/month) or ancient CodeCanyon plugins that haven't been updated since 2017. I wanted something self-hosted, one-time payment, no external API calls.

What StockPulse does

Days of Stock Remaining — calculates how many days your current stock will last based on your actual sales velocity.

Smart Reorder Points — tells you exactly when to reorder, factoring in your supplier lead time plus a 25% safety buffer:

reorder_point = (daily_velocity × lead_time_days) + safety_stock
safety_stock = daily_velocity × (lead_time_days × 0.25)

Dead Stock Detection — flags products with 60+ days of stock and zero recent sales so you can run promotions before they become a write-off.

30/60/90-day demand forecasts — projects future demand using three algorithms (SMA, WMA, Exponential Smoothing) with automatic selection based on data availability.

Email alerts — notifies you when products hit critical stock levels.

CSV export — full data export for deeper analysis.

The tech stack

Built with PHP 7.4+ (OOP, PSR-4 structure), vanilla JS + Chart.js for the admin dashboard, WordPress REST API for data endpoints, and WP-Cron for daily cache refresh.

Fully HPOS-compatible (uses wc_get_orders() — no raw SQL on order tables).