Hoping someone else has had the same issue and can shed some light on a solution! We run an apparel brand and sell unisex products, so traditionally have created one product in Shopify that links to one set of SKU variants and barcodes at our warehouse.
Recently we’ve taken the decision to split these into two products within Shopify, just with separate imagery, so women and men can see more appropriate image to their browsing through the site and collections.
We’ve run into a problem where despite the SKUs remaining the same, stock levels are not refreshing at the same level. For example, if a male customer buys the last small t-shirt, this is not updated within Shopify and a female customer can buy that unavailable unit, and we have to contact them to discuss other options.
After speaking to a Shopify advisor, they suggested that as these are two separate product listings, the system treats them as independent and will only deduct stock from the specific product that was purchased.
They reported that this can’t be solved easily and we would need to integrate an inventory management system or third party app to resolve the issue.
This seems like something that could be quite a broad issue for brands with unisex products looking to offer customers specific imagery/content, so I’m hoping someone has a solution, or can suggest a management system/app to solve this?
Hey, that’s a classic inventory headache, and it’s so frustrating when a logical change for customers causes this behind the scenes.
The real issue is that you now have two separate products fighting over one physical stock pool with no referee.
Here’s a quick fix to stop the bleeding: Stick with one product, but use an app like Growave to create “Audience” filters. This lets you show men’s or women’s imagery on separate collection pages, while all clicks lead back to the one product with one inventory source. It’s a band-aid, but it works.
If you’re tired of workarounds, I’ve just started offering a deep-dive Operations Health Check to find the root cause of problems like this. I’m doing it at a discount for my first few clients. If you’re interested, just reply here and I’ll link you to my contact info.
I completely understand your situation — this is a pretty common challenge for apparel brands that split unisex products into separate listings for men and women.
I’d recommend trying the Inventory Sync - GoGo app. It’s designed exactly for this kind of setup — where duplicate products share the same SKUs but need to stay in sync in real time.
With this app, your stock levels will automatically update across all linked products. So, for example, if a male customer buys the last Small T-shirt, the corresponding Small T-shirt in the women’s product will immediately update as “out of stock” — keeping everything perfectly synced.
It’s also a one-click setup and works seamlessly with your existing Shopify inventory system.
Hi @jackleddington, the app Material Manager can help with this. It would let you enter an inventory for each of your shirts into the app. Then you would link each shirt to the Shopify variants that use it. The app automatically syncs the inventory for all variants that use the same materials (shirts).
This is actually a common situation when brands split unisex products into separate listings for better merchandising (e.g. men vs women), but still share the same physical inventory.
As Shopify mentioned, even if the SKUs are identical, the system treats each product as a separate inventory source, so stock won’t sync automatically between them.
