How to set and limit quantity of all products to X automatically?

[ArtistryAI]

Hi there. I have requested help from several developers but many are either unable to do it, or charge what I consider high prices for a simple application.

I am basically creating a print-on-demand store with Printful. When adding products from Printful to Shopify, all products and their variants are set to 'Quantity not tracked' - meaning you can sell as many as you want. Here's the catch, I want to set quantity to 1 (or an arbitrary number), whereby I limit the products sold to 1 each, and once sold, all the products are removed automatically.

For example, imagine I am selling a limited edition shirt design to sell max 10 pieces. I want only 10 of such shirts to be sold, regardless of size (S, M, L, XL etc). Therefore, manually setting the quantities is impossible. As such, I am trying to implement a method whereby all products on my store is hardcoded to sell only x times each.

Does anyone have a viable solution to suggest?

[productsync]

Hi

Sounds like you just need to bundle each variation against the inventory shirt product which all are printed from. Our bundling solution recalculates inventory based on a core item so all your shirts sizes would only show what can be made from an original quantity. This does involve bundling each variation so might not be worthwhile if you have thousands of items as you would need to do it in bulk via a csv which would take time to create.

Regards

Tom

[StreetCouture]

Hello, did you ever solve your problem. I have the exact same issue, I sell limited edition collections, and don't want to have to manually set the quantity by color or size. So if there is 100 pieces of an item, then as people buy the small size in black or the medium in red, then the quantity in total goes from 100 to 98. Right now it seems it's not possible to do that. If anyone has found a solution that would be great.

[StreetCouture]

Still trying to find a solution, reached out to various Freelancers, but they were not able to solve the issue as the stock on Shopify comes from Printful, and there seems to be no way to manually set it. If in the meanwhile you have found a solution, do please let me know.

[Imogen]

Hi, there! Thanks for following up on this thread, @StreetCouture! My name is Imogen. It's good to meet you!

I came across your comment on this older thread, and definitely felt like chiming in. OP is correct that when it comes to using PoD services and having to have your inventory tracking set as 'Quantity not Tracked.' However, if you're thinking about doing limited product releases, I actually think there's a very simple solution to this, do it may cost some funds up front.

There are many PoD businesses and 'exclusivity' brands that employ a strategy like this. You purchase the amount of stock of a specific product you want to sell (so let's say, you pay your PoD supplier to print 10 of a shirt, because you want to sell specifically 10 of this design) and you hold that inventory yourself. Whenever one of these exclusive products sell, you actually handle the package and shipping yourself. This strategy provides you with some benefits, like a faster shipping time to your purchasing customer, along with the ability to us some customer packaging, if you have some, for these products. This suggestion works best for smaller product launches (so maybe only 1 or 2 products you want to sell '10' of) vs. larger exclusivity launches.

Outside of this strategy, it would be best to hire someone like a Shopify Partner to see if they can assist you any coding changes needed to make this inventory flow a reality.

[StreetCouture]

Hi,

Thanks for your message. Unfortunately that won’t work as the limit is 1000 pieces per collection. I have worked with a Shopify expert and a freelancing company and both were not able to find a solution. I do see on message boards and other places that this is an issue for many POD sellers who want to create simple solutions. I see min/max solutions offered in Apps but that is always to limit within one basket or by customer, while I want to limit total pieces. If you know of anyone who could adapt the code of my store to accomplish that, I would be interested. On the POD site, Printful, it’s not possible to limit. But I would think there must be a way on the Shopify side to limit total quantity once a threshold is reached. Thanks for anyone’s help to try to solve this. I see a lot of other people out there with the same issue, it could help them as well. Thanks.

[Erin]

Hi, @StreetCouture. Thank you for sharing that additional context!

In Shopify you would use the inventory tracking setting to limit the quantity of a product that can be sold. If the POD service you're using requires you to have that setting set as 'Quantity not Tracked' the only workaround I can think of, without using a third party app or developer, is the method Imogen shared. That being said, I can understand why you may not want to front the cost of 1000 products. In this case I'd recommend reducing the limit to a number you'd be comfortable paying for up front, or looking around to see if another developer or third party app can assist with this. You can find developers that may be able to help in the Shopify Partner Directory here. 

[TwoLeftHands]

Thank you for this post.  I have the exact same issue.  We are releasing shirt designs in limited quantities and need to show that to buyers on the product page to create a sense or urgency to purchase.  Please post if you find a solution.  Have a good day.

[StreetCouture]

Hi, I have not found a solution yet and it's very frustrating. I see a lot of young entrepreneurs starting brands and they want to be able to have limited collections. It would be so easy to add a feature to limit the quantity to X, and you put then a counter on the shopify site saying ONLY Y pieces left... If anyone finds a solution, please post a comment here. 

[FusionInventory]

Our app Fusion Inventory can handle this use case pretty well. Here is the user guide.

Feel free to try it out and reach out to me by email if you have any questions.