I just recently started making t-shirts to sell in my store, and on my website, but I don’t want to make a lot of any one design. What I would like to do is show the design as the product, have shirt color and size as variants, and have all of the designs pull from the same shirt inventory. This would allow me to produce the shirts as they are ordered rather, and not have to update inventory on every product as orders occur. Currently the only option that Shopify has is to list the shirts as the product with the designs and size as variants. Obviously, this would be less conducive to sales than my version would because blank shirts are not as exciting as ones that are designed, so people would be less likely to click on the blank shirt. I am concerned about allowing to sell shirts that are out of stock because I want to sell some of my inventory before having to buy new ones.
Please do not try to sell me a full redesign of my site! I will ask for help with that when I am ready.
You could view this as ‘personalisations’ to a single T Shirt product, and as such could use a 3rd party app such as ‘Product Personalizer’ (I am not affiliated, just searched for it). Not sure if this would handle the total inventory issue if that is vital.
You could deselect inventory tracking on the product itself. This would allow you to add design, colour and size as variants. This would allow people to see and purchase the product variants even though they have a inventory number of ‘0’. You could then just look at the Orders to see how many of each you will need to produce. A similar approach is to select ‘allow purchases when out of stock’ on the product itself also. It achieves essentially the same result.
Alternatively, you could comission a custom app to be developed to handle this use case where you want to track the inventory of the product as a whole rather than tracking the inventory of the variants. This may already exist, I’m sure if it does someone will comment. If not, I’d be happy to help develop this custom solution.
However, personally, I think option 2 is the most sensible as long as there is not a very fixed total number of t shirts that can’t be changed, in which case 1 or 3 make more sense.
Yeah, that’s the idea. That way when a person orders a white shirt for
design A, that shirt also comes off of designs B and C.
It would help a small growing company to not have to order 100’s or shirts
in each size and color, and would allow me to not run the risk of needing
to order More blank shirts before fulfilling an order.
You would only need to use this app @ScottArcher to get the solution you want.
You create one bundle with the white T-Shirt as the master product and then all the other products are included underneath. Their inventory will thus always be in sync. Cheers!
Sorry jumping in here a bit late. Sounds like all you need is to bundle each of your product variants from the blank shirts. So you could have all White Size M shirt designs all linked to the same inventory SKU and thus once they sell whatever design it updates all your products.
We are testing a new bundling solution now if you are interested in seeing if it would work for your solution. There are other bundling apps available but most work around creating custom pages in a theme.
If you bundle up each variant as you would need to in this scenario each variation qty available will be calculated from the component stock. So if that component is on 100 variants every variant would reduce as a component gets sold.
Happy to help guide in setup and testing so just get in touch.
Yes, that is exactly what I want to happen. I don’t want the general public to have to select the generic blank white shirt, I want them to select the design then want and then choose it on the white, and all of the shirts that offer white to be updated.
There are a couple of options to go with to solve your challenge.
Use a bundles app: Create your “raw” shirt as a product. You then create other shirts and convert them to bundles that draw 1 unit of “raw” shirt from the shirt product. This option is quite simple and easy to achieve with the bundling apps available on the App store. The only drawback of this option is that you need to manage your raw materials (the raw shirt) on Shopify admin which might not be what you want as you can accidentally publish the raw shirt and make it visible to your customers.
Use an inventory management app. This option gives you a lot more control over your bundling / manufacturing process along with tighter cost tracking and control. The only drawback of this option would be cost as most of the inventory management apps are more expansive than the bundling apps.
I hope this helps. Happy to advise further if needed.
Tahar
CEO | Co-Founder
Stock&Buy, a simple yet powerful inventory management platform
Is the only way to do this with Shopify is by paying for a 3rd party app? This seems like it would be highly used by Shopify customers. I would love to know if anyone has a solution in the Shopify admin for this. I need the same function as listed by OP.
Scott I hope you are at home yelling at your screen like me. These responses are so hollow and dont lead anywhere. It’s really frustrating how simple this can be solved but everything responding seems like ai.
What did you end up doing? I am in the same exact boat as you but instead of T-shirts I use cutting boards. I want my customers to pick a design, THEN the board.
Can you explain how this bundle app will help us? And let me remind you the original issue:
We want a customer to choose a design first THEN the physical item to put it on… but when that customer chooses their 1 physical item, we want the inventory of that physical item to decrease in all available design choices on our site. The description of this app continues to talk about creating fixed bundles or multipacks of existing products… which is not the same. If I am wrong, please explain more because it’s not clear on the app description page.