Limiting total seats across Gold/Silver workshop variants (10-person cap) with different prices; Shopify has no native way to share inventory across variants or a specific day/time option.
Proposed solutions:
Inventory sync apps that share stock between variants so a purchase of one reduces the other: Connected Inventory (suggested), Material Manager (use a shared “Jewellery workshop seats” raw material = 10; qualifies for free plan per vendor), Easify Inventory Sync (create a mutual inventory group of 10 for both variants).
Bundling: create a “place reservation” SKU with stock 10 and bundle it with Gold or Silver materials; or sell the base workshop at the Silver price and bundle a Gold surcharge; alternatively use custom options apps for priced add‑ons.
Booking app: Easy Appointment Booking to manage attendees/schedules, support variants, send emails, integrate Google Calendar, and process payments via Shopify checkout.
Next steps/status: The merchant requested app recommendations; another participant asked for the store URL to advise on app vs. theme tweaks. No final decision yet; solutions remain open.
Summarized with AI on December 20.
AI used: gpt-5.
I run a jewellery workshop for 10 people, where participants can choose to work with either Gold or Silver. The workshop lasts 3 hours, and the materials have different costs, so they are sold at different prices. However, since my workshop space only has 10 seats, I want to limit the booking to 10 participants total, regardless of the material choice. Currently, Shopify doesn’t seem to allow me to set this limit to the day/time variant.
Am I missing something? How can I link the available seats to the total number of participants, rather than the material option
One option is to use an App which will sync inventory between these 2 variants. So you have Gold variant, starting inventory 10 and Silver variant, starting inventory 10 and each time one of those variants is purchased its updated inventory is synched onto another one.
Another approach is to create product bundles – Gold bundle will Consist of “place reservation” and “gold materials”, Silver will consist of the same “place reservation” and “silver materials”. “Place reservation” will have inventory of 10. As soon as all place reservations are sold (as part of bundles), all bundles become sold out.
Or, have “Workshop” which will have a price of Silver, but Gold will be a bundle consisting of “Workshop” and “Gold surcharge” product…
There are other ways, for example there are “custom options” apps which allow you to add a “priced” addon to a product…
Our app Material Manager can help you with this. You would have 2 variants in your website, one for the workshop with gold and one for the workshop with silver. Then within the app you would create a raw material called something like “Jewellery workshop seats” with a quantity of 10, then link this raw material to both of those variants. When one variant is sold it will automatically update the other one to the maximum of “Jewellery workshop seats” still available.
With this scenario you should also qualify for our free plan.
You can easily resolve your issue with the Easify Inventory Sync app. It lets you create an Inventory group for all variants of your workshop products (Gold & Silver), setting a mutual inventory of 10 . This means that when any variant is purchased, the inventory for the other variant will be automatically adjusted by the same amount.
The app is user-friendly, and if you need any assistance with the setup, feel free to let me know or reach out to the Easify team.
I’m Ray from Easy Appointment Booking. This app lets you take bookings that manage your attendees and schedule, which works especially well for workshops. Jewelry-related appointment is one of our top use cases, I think we can help!
Each booking gets registered in the app with an automatic email sent to that customer. The integration with Shopify lets you find the corresponding Shopify order and customer, while tagging those for quick and easy reporting (for example, do customers who booked Workshop 1 have a higher order value than customers who didn’t attend)
You can also add one-off dates, integrate your Google Calendar, and have all your payments flow through Shopify checkout.
Would love to have you try out the app, our team can happily get you set up
. This means that when any variant is purchased, the inventory for the other variant will be automatically adjusted by the same amount.