Inventory tracking for products that use shared resources

[marvic]

Hi there,

how to allow inventory tracking for products that use shared resources? Lets say I have two products in large quantities, but I only have 500 units of packaging available, limiting the total sales of both products to 500. I can manually set each product to 250, which is fine if there are only 2 products, but with a bigger store this gets tedious. Is there an easy way (preferably without a 3rd party app) to set the availability of both products to 500 and once one of them is sold the availability of BOTH are reduced by 1?

Thank you!

[garyrgilbert]

Hey there,

just out of curiosity, why would you limit a customer from purchasing a product because of available packaging. Is this specialty packaging? Wouldn't you really want to "make the sale" and worry about how to package the shipment afterwards.

If you start mucking about with available quantities based on this "shared-resource" you will never be able to have an accurate picture in shopify of actual product on hand.

Depending on your volume of sales and whether it is relatively "predictable" I would rather create a trigger to automatically order more packaging once you reach a specific threshold, taking the delivery lead time into account.  That way you will always end up with a new shipment of packaging before you run out.  You could set up your shared-resource as an invisible product or draft product and then every time a product is sold that uses that packaging reduce its quantity by one.  Then nightly you could build a cron job to query your shared resources and automatically order more once the threshold has been reached.

Cheers,

Gary