How can we maintain product level inventory for items with multiple variants?

[harry99]

We have products with several variants but still want to maintain a product level inventory rather than variant level inventory.

How can we achieve this?

Thanks

[Dirk]

Hey, @harry99 

The way our inventory works is that when you have a product with multiple variants (let's say a T-Shirt in size small, medium, and large), that product's inventory is broken down into its individual variants. This is the most practical method because you technically don't have a T-Shirt that is sizeless. It's either going to be small, medium, or large.

Is there a particular reason you want the parent product to also have an inventory number associated with it? If there is anything else I can help you with, please let me know.

[harry99]

Hi @Dirk 

Say we custom make T-shirts and have fabric to make 1 t-shirt of any variant and if any of the variant is sold we want to product to be out of stock.

This is the reason we only want Product level stocks rather than variant levels.

What are our options?

[Dirk]

That makes sense, @harry99 

Within  Shopify, you can unify the stock levels so that all the variants share the same stock levels in order to reflect the base quantity of that product (fabric, shirt, etc.).

There is an app called Connected Inventory that will allow you to accomplish this.

Otherwise, you can manually change the inventory yourself by applying your inventory quantity to all variants in a selected product:

If there is anything else I can help you with, please let me know.

[harry99]

Thanks, @Dirk ,

I will look into these.

[Dirk]

Anytime, @harry99! Let me know if that helps.

[Cameron_Christi]

This is more common than you might imagine. We build phone cases to suit, but the phone case frame is the inventory item. I had 37 designs (variants), but the inventory number that matters is the frame which should be decremented at the product not variant level.  This applies to other products as well, where we carry one "blank" and create 50+ variants.  I wish there was an "In Shopify" solution to this issue. 

[harry99]

Cannot agree more, WooCommerce / BigCommerce and all the other platforms have this basic function in-built.

Hope Shopify can add this soon.

[Sam173]

I hope Shopify builds this solution on the admin without having to use a 3rd party app. It takes third party apps processing time to update the stock resulting in overselling and other issues. Makes me really miss WooCommerce. If you found any apps that work well for high volume please let me know. Stock adjustments need to happen in real time, and batching in 5 minutes or taking 1-3 minutes to update stock under race conditions is not scalable. 

[tman1616]

I sell limited edition artwork and have exactly the same issue, we use Shopify variants for each frame option but stupidly there is no way to set an overall stock level for the overall product (like you can do on Etsy) and have to keep changing the variant quantities to make sure it doesn't oversell - so time consuming and literally have to stop the product before it has even sold out just so I don't sell over my stock. I did find an app called Upsell Product Addons  that helped solve this issue. I create an add-on for each framing option then assign it to the artwork, the app calculates the stock for the artwork and frame separately so if the artwork sells out it stops people from being able to purchase a framed option also. Its a paid app but totally worth it but annoying Shopify doesn't have this as standard. tbh I don't think they will ever change this because there isn't enough of us