Greetings! I have been a shopify Affiliate developer for just over and year now and have found a lot of help and answers to questions from these discussion boards over that time however this will be my first time as the original poster for a thread .
Currently I am mid development on a store for a client and I have encountered a bit of a roadblock regarding what method to use when it comes to organizing and displaying the clients Catalogue. This roadblock exists because this particular client has very unique needs when it comes to his products as well as the images and media each product uses.
My client primarily sells Livestock, mostly captive bred fish. Normally I would treat this just like any other product catalogue I would create and populate for a client but there is a bit of a twist with this one.
The fish being sold have been bred and groomed in captivity for Shows ( competitions , livestock auctions etc ) and as a result of this , my clients requires a system in place that will be able to effectively display unique individual fish as products as well as images and video clips taken live of each individual fish. Once sold , the fish is than unavailable ( zero stock ) untill it has been removed from the catalogue with all the remaining fish for sale.
Ideally the goal is to have the catalogue set up in such a way that variants of Products , housed in nested Collections , will always only have a stock count of 1 and once sold, the variant can be replaced by a new version. Simply manually deleting the sold variant and adding its replacement OR editing the variant to reflect the replacements info , while seemly the most straightforward approach in this situation is not going to be an option I would want to use because the turnaround on these products can sometimes be as fast as minutes. Additionally often the total amount of fish being made available for purchase can be in the triple digits.
The ideal solution would be to almost mimic in shopify somehow, the containers that house each individual fish combined with an efficient method of inserting and removing them and their attached data ( price, image, description etc )
I have been brainstorming and playing with a few ideas for a solution but they all have own unique advantages and disadvantages. I have also played around with the idea of developing a very light app to handle this scenario.
Here’s an example in practice to help illustrate what I mean for clarification.
MENU
African Cichlids <----- ** COLLECTION **
Peacocks
Red Shoulder – red shoulder #942 - 120$ <----** PRODUCT & VARIANTS ***
– red shoulder #543 - 80$
– red shoulder #076 - 90$ - SOLD
Neon Blue – Neon blue # 497 - 50$
– Neon blue # 665 - 100$ -SOLD
– Neon blue # 53- 180$
Pink Albino – Pink Albino #400 - 70$
– Pink Albino #828 - 110$ - SOLD
Hopefully I haven’t made things too complicated. Any he’ll would be greatly appreciated .