Having multiple products draw from same inventory

[ScottArcher]

I just recently started making t-shirts to sell in my store, and on my website, but I don't want to make a lot of any one design. What I would like to do is show the design as the product, have shirt color and size as variants, and have all of the designs pull from the same shirt inventory. This would allow me to produce the shirts as they are ordered rather, and not have to update inventory on every product as orders occur. Currently the only option that Shopify has is to list the shirts as the product with the designs and size as variants. Obviously, this would be less conducive to sales than my version would because blank shirts are not as exciting as ones that are designed, so people would be less likely to click on the blank shirt. I am concerned about allowing to sell shirts that are out of stock because I want to sell some of my inventory before having to buy new ones. 

Please do not try to sell me a full redesign of my site! I will ask for help with that when I am ready.

[JHKCreate]

Hi @ScottArcher 

So let's see if we got this straight: 

- You have a generic white T-Shirt that has for example a stock count of 100
- All your other T-Shirts feed off the 100 count again
- You want a way so that all the variant t-shirts pull the inventory from the generic white T-Shirt above

Correct?

[ScottArcher]

Yeah, that's the idea. That way when a person orders a white shirt for
design A, that shirt also comes off of designs B and C.
It would help a small growing company to not have to order 100's or shirts
in each size and color, and would allow me to not run the risk of needing
to order More blank shirts before fulfilling an order.

[JHKCreate]

You would only need to use this app @ScottArcher to get the solution you want. 

You create one bundle with the white T-Shirt as the master product and then all the other products are included underneath. Their inventory will thus always be in sync. Cheers!

[AIMEELEIGH]

What App will pull the inventory of one shirt from multiple design listings?

[smandabach]

@JHKCreate what app are you mentioning with this post?:

---

@JHKCreate wrote:

You would only need to use this app @ScottArcher to get the solution you want. 

You create one bundle with the white T-Shirt as the master product and then all the other products are included underneath. Their inventory will thus always be in sync. Cheers!

---

[channelup]

Hey

Sorry jumping in here a bit late. Sounds like all you need is to bundle each of your product variants from the blank shirts. So you could have all White Size M shirt designs all linked to the same inventory SKU and thus once they sell whatever design it updates all your products.

We are testing a new bundling solution now if you are interested in seeing if it would work for your solution. There are other bundling apps available but most work around creating custom pages in a theme. 

Regards

Tom

[Raluca3]

the app has a 1.7 rating out of 5.... Is there another similar app that is more reliable?

[JHKCreate]

You can try the free Shopify Bundles app here.

Let us know!

[mzent]

Can you explain how this bundle app will help us?  And let me remind you the original issue: 

We want a customer to choose a design first THEN the physical item to put it on..... but when that customer chooses their 1 physical item, we want the inventory of that physical item to decrease in all available design choices on our site.   The description of this app continues to talk about creating fixed bundles or multipacks of existing products.... which is not the same.  If I am wrong, please explain more because it's not clear on the app description page. 

[TheDaintyDragon]

I am having trouble with the exact same issue and dying for an answer .. did you figure out a solution to this inventory issue?

[channelup]

Hi

We added the option to recalculate all available inventory to our bundling app: https://apps.shopify.com/bundleup

If you bundle up each variant as you would need to in this scenario each variation qty available will be calculated from the component stock. So if that component is on 100 variants every variant would reduce as a component gets sold.

Happy to help guide in setup and testing so just get in touch.

Regards

Tom

[larfstyle]

Scott I hope you are at home yelling at your screen like me. These responses are so hollow and dont lead anywhere. It's really frustrating how simple this can be solved but everything responding seems like ai. 

[ScottArcher]

Yes, that is exactly what I want to happen. I don't want the general public to have to select the generic blank white shirt, I want them to select the design then want and then choose it on the white, and all of the shirts that offer white to be updated. 

[Tahar]

There are a couple of options to go with to solve your challenge.

1. Use a bundles app: Create your "raw" shirt as a product. You then create other shirts and convert them to bundles that draw 1 unit of "raw" shirt from the shirt product. This option is quite simple and easy to achieve with the bundling apps available on the App store. The only drawback of this option is that you need to manage your raw materials (the raw shirt) on Shopify admin which might not be what you want as you can accidentally publish the raw shirt and make it visible to your customers.
2. Use an inventory management app. This option gives you a lot more control over your bundling / manufacturing process along with tighter cost tracking and control. The only drawback of this option would be cost as most of the inventory management apps are more expansive than the bundling apps.

I hope this helps. Happy to advise further if needed.

Tahar

CEO | Co-Founder

Stock&Buy, a simple yet powerful inventory management platform

[mzent]

What did you end up doing?  I am in the same exact boat as you but instead of T-shirts I use cutting boards.  I want my customers to pick a design, THEN the board.  

[jchristie]

Hi @ScottArcher,

Here's a couple of potential solutions:

1. You could view this as 'personalisations' to a single T Shirt product, and as such could use a 3rd party app such as 'Product Personalizer' (I am not affiliated, just searched for it). Not sure if this would handle the total inventory issue if that is vital.

2. You could deselect inventory tracking on the product itself. This would allow you to add design, colour and size as variants. This would allow people to see and purchase the product variants even though they have a inventory number of '0'. You could then just look at the Orders to see how many of each you will need to produce. A similar approach is to select 'allow purchases when out of stock' on the product itself also. It achieves essentially the same result.

3. Alternatively, you could comission a custom app to be developed to handle this use case where you want to track the inventory of the product as a whole rather than tracking the inventory of the variants. This may already exist, I'm sure if it does someone will comment. If not, I'd be happy to help develop this custom solution.

However, personally, I think option 2 is the most sensible as long as there is not a very fixed total number of t shirts that can't be changed, in which case 1 or 3 make more sense.

Kind regards,

James

[emilietra]

I am having the exact same issue. Did you find a solution that works for you? I'd be curious to know. Thank you!

[mzent]

Is the only way to do this with Shopify is by paying for a 3rd party app?   This seems like it would be highly used by Shopify customers.  I would love to know if anyone has a solution in the Shopify admin for this.  I need the same function as listed by OP. 

[angiahp]

@jchristie I would be interested in custom development... would it be possible for you to get in touch via email angiahp1@gmail.com

[Heather_Rolinsk]

Hi @ScottArcher Did you find a solution? I have the same issue, I have a bar soap that is both a human soap AND a pet soap. But I can't create variants, they are being listed separately and marketed as two completely different products drawing from the same inventory.

[aosoble]

Hi @Heather_Rolinsk , I'm currently developing an app that can be used to share the same inventory across different products. The app will launch on 1st November 2023. Feel free to email me at "aosoble[AT]fusioninventory.app" for any questions.