Feature Request: Case Breaks

[petgrocer]

Copying from my other thread, since threads with 'feature request' in the title seems to get better attention.

Looking for solution for case breaks. We are a real retail store, that went from a fully function POS system (SmartVendor) to the semi-functional version with Shopify. Our inventory is never correct now, as it has no option for case breaks. I spend (was 5) 8 hours a week manually doing inventory checks and doing inventory adjustments for case breaks. There is no app (yet another $50 a month for something that should be standard on retail POS). There is no answer from Shopify (other than the rote 'we will pass it to the dev team' then we are never to hear from them again).  It's so painful. No communication, no solutions. Surely we are not the only retailer who is using cases of items that are sold in cases or eaches! Any solutions? Any recommendations? Any idea how to get Shopify to communicate with REAL answers about if something will be addressed or not? 

[RubyWalker]

We don’t need this functionality in our (fashion) store, but I feel your pain on features that ideally would be part of the core product but, for whatever reason, just aren’t yet. As no one has jumped on here so far with anything useful, let me at least tell you how I would go about addressing this in our store, by way of a possible short-term solution you could explore.

If I’ve understood your issue correctly, I think it would be quite possible to use the Shopify API to construct some code that ran automatically each night and:

1. Scanned the store’s inventory for products having an ‘each’ variant with a stock level < 0
2. Identified a matching ‘case’ variant.
3. Added the case size/quantity to the ‘each’ variant’s stock level
4. Decreased the ‘case’ variant stock level by 1

To quickly test the theory, I hacked together some code this morning to do just that and added one of your products (Nootka - Black Cod Livers) to our store, with the ‘each’ 100g can quantity set to -3 and the ‘case of 24’ quantity set to 5. When I ran the code, it correctly identified the product needing a case break, reset the ‘each’ variant quantity to -3+24 = 21 and the ‘case’ variant quantity to 5-1=4. So, at a basic level, with a single store location, it seems this might be a workable approach.

Of course, if you needed the case breaks to be a real-time thing (i.e. adjusted after every sale) then you would likely need a more sophisticated solution - but for a simple once-a-day/overnight automated sweep of the inventory, finding someone you could work with on a little code utility similar to the above *might* get the job done for you.

[petgrocer]

@RubyWalker this is an exciting answer for us! You've outlined it as we are using it, and yes, our previous system also did a scan once a day (usually as the retail store closed) to check for 'case breaks' and would change the inventory levels. We are not coders, or even that tech savvy so we are not sure how to even get into the Shopify API or what that is. I would love to learn if this is something straightforward we could do, like you have tested out. Eager to hear if we can use your code! Thanks so much for taking the time and effort to test it out and let us know about your possible solution.

[RubyWalker]

Responded offline.

[Wedevagency]

@petgrocer Would you be open to custom private Shopify App solution?

[petgrocer]

We aren't in a position to be paying over and over and over for third party unsupported (by Shopify) apps that are doing a function that should be standard in a system this expensive. 

Going to reach out to RubyWalker to see if we can implement that suggestion.

[nomadbrad]

We all really need to see this feature, it's very basic but a huge important feature to keep accurate stock. Please shopify add this.