Shopify and Quickbooks: Multiple Variants with a Single SKU

[Dascalargo]

OK, I've seen similar questions, but not covering my exact situation. I need advice for an app or another way to pull this off.

I use Shopify (obviously), for both my in-store POS and my website, along with Quickbooks Online and the  Connector. So far, so good.

I have a number of products that are on a single SKU, but which have variants. For example, journals which are made from vinyl records. Because the store came first, these are all on one SKU, regardless of whether it's Frank Sinatra or Sesame Street. Up until the website launched, all I cared about is how many journals I had, thus one SKU.

Now that the website is growing, I want online customers to be able to choose their exact journal, as they do in the store. Right now I use King Product Options & Variants to create virtual variants. (GREAT app, BTW! It is able to do so much... just not what I want. It works perfectly with my theme and is completely transparent to the user.) So in the back end, I have one SKU with 20 units available, but shoppers online can choose their own title. When a title sells, be it in-store or online, I manually delete the title from the King app. If there was a way for each King variant to be sold only once, that'd be perfect.

This is quickly becoming too cumbersome and unreliable as I have more products with these virtual options. I either don't have the time in the moment to update the King virtual options so we double-sell a specific item or we forget to note which title was sold in-store and have to do an inventory to figure out what's missing (and then remove it from the website).

The logical choice, here, would be to create actual variants in Shopify—but that creates a nightmare in Quickbooks. While Shopify is the POS, inventory is (and will continue to be) managed through Quickbooks. 

Since each variant is a one-of-a-kind (i.e. will always have an inventory of either 1 or 0), I tried creating actual variants in Shopify and setting them with a inventory of 1 with the idea that we would manually change the SKU on the invoice in Quickbooks (e.g. we sell SKU "JOURNAL-SINATRA01" in Shopify, but then change it on the invoice to SKU "JOURNAL"). While this would be a lot of extra effort, I'd live with it if it accomplished our goal... at least for now. The problem is that the new variant products all sync to QBO immediately AND then the inventory is synced back to Shopify, setting them all back to 0. (Not to mention having to archive a crapload of products in QBO.)

What I need are variants in Shopify that sync to a single SKU in Quickbooks... or something like that. I know others have sought similar, though not exactly the same functionality. I'd love to use actual variants in Shopify (rather than an app) and have the integration be able to filter the products that need to sync to a single SKU. I accept that I'm probably going to have to pay for a more robust integration rather than use the free connector.

So, those of you who prowl the Community to pitch your apps, if it does what I need, pitch away! I started looking through the App Store, but there are too many options to sift through. 

If you think there's another way to accomplish what I'm trying to do, I'd also welcome your input. I keep thinking if there was a way to filter certain SKUs from syncing their inventory I could pull it off, but that doesn't seem possible.

Any other ideas?

[Dascalargo · Accepted solution]

I think I've found a solution for my own issue, but knowing there are others also trying to do the something similar, I thought I'd share what I did.

In Shopify, all variants for a product with one-of-a-kind variants have the same SKU and the same barcode. I know that's taboo, but it's working for me (at least for the moment). Because of this, in-store all of the variants have the same price tag.

When synced with Quickbooks, each of these variants has an inventory equal to the total off all variants. That is to say, SKU JOURNAL in QBO has a total of 3 in inventory. Each JOURNAL variant therefore has a total of 3 in Shopify, meaning the product shows a total of 9. Obviously, if you're using Shopify to track inventory, this doesn't work, but I'm not.

When a journal is sold in-store, the Duplicate Barcode list pops up, so I choose the variant being sold. When one is sold online, the customer has already chosen their variant.

Either way, because they all have the same SKU, when the transaction syncs to Quickbooks it subtracts one of that SKU from inventory, which was what I wanted. I have a total of 2 in QBO inventory and when the sync back to Shopify happens, each variant now has inventory of 2. Again, I don't care.

Here's what makes it work for me: I have a workflow which is triggered when an order is paid for. If one of these one-of-a-kind items is in the order, the workflow deletes the variant that was just sold. It disappears from the website. The one-of-a-kind item can be purchased by only one customer.

Obviously if the customer tries to purchase more than one of a one-of-a-kind item, there's going to be an issue. To avoid this, I explain in the description that there is only one of each, but I also have a one-of-a-kind product template that removes the Quantity selector from those pages. The workflow mentioned above also looks for that template to decide when to delete a variant.

It's far from perfect, but more reliable—and less work—than what I've been doing.

I realize I may be the only one who ever reads this, but maybe someone else searching the Community will find this and it'll help them.