Split stock/inventory between customer groups

[OS-Mitch]

Hi there,

one of our clients is starting to sell B2B. Now we have the following issue:
They don't have dedicated B2B products, which means the same products/SKU will be sold to both B2B and B2C customers. And what makes this tricky - they want to limited the amount available to B2B and B2C customers. So let's say you have a product with 100 units, they want to offer 75 to B2B and 25 to B2C.

Their 3PL can only provide them the total stock per product. We thought about just creating a new "virtual" location where we allocate 25 units from the example above and subtract that from the initial stock. However, that way their 3PL will overwrite the initial stock automatically and we end up with 25 units more in Shopify than are in the actual warehouse.

I know there's a feature like that on Shopify Plus, but the upgrade to Plus isn't in the cards right now. Is there any way to achieve this in other Shopify plans or an app with this feature?

tl,dr: How to divide stock of one location for B2B and B2C customers and basically create a virtual warehouse/stock level so both customer groups can only order a certain amount of that product.

[Kalen_Jordan]

Do you already require login before showing prices/availability on the site? Maybe one way to do it would be to ping a webhook from the frontend that could determine inventory availability by customer tag.

Another probably simpler way to do it would be to have a separate store for b2b from dtc and sync inventory between them. Not nearly as much of a price jump as going to plus.

[OS-Mitch]

Hi Kalen,

the B2C prices will show right away, once logged in and if your account is tagged as B2B, you will see the discounted/non-taxed prices.

We're thinking about a second store as well, but so far the apps I've found for inventory sync are more focused on syncing orders and inventory from different stores with one main store. So if a product is ordered on a different store, it will be deducted from the main store as well. But so far I haven't seen any proper inventory splitting. And more importantly - that won't solve the issue where their 3PL will overwrite the total stock at least on the main store.

Edit: Yes one rather easy solution would've been to just disable the add-to-cart in case there's no inventory for your customers group. But where would you fetch that information from? Sure you could hard code it, but that's not really a proper solution and would need a ton of manual work.

[Kalen_Jordan]

Sorry for the late reply. I can do a 2-way sync, but yeah you've got the 3pl issue.

So you wouldn't need to hard code anything - you'd ping a mesa workflow like this, and then within the workflow you could determine based on the customer who is viewing the page, what the available inventory should be to them.