I have a site that sells limited quantity made to order products. I offer these products in a few variations and allow for 6 items sold per week. Customers go to the site, place their orders and when I get to 6 orders I make the products in whatever variants they ordered.
The issue I have is that Shopify requires me to select the inventory level for each variant. I know I can turn off inventory tracking but then I run the risk of too many orders.
But I cannot accurately calculate the inventory because everything is made to order.
EX: I offer a product in 2 colors, white and black, I want to allow 6 people to order and tell me if they want white or black. Shopify requires me to update the inventory for both variants so I set them to 3 available of each.
What happens if black is more popular this week and I have 5 people who want black and only 1 that wants white? Black would show as sold out as soon as it hits 3 sales.
This seems like it should be an easy fix but has been frustrating.
Yes, as recommended above you can have black variant and white variant, each of them set to 6 and an app which will synchronise inventory between them so that when one white variant is bought, the black one has inventory decreased to be 5 too.
This is a good option if you need to keep different price on those two.
However, if you have the same price and same inventory, then you can have a single variant and pass the color as line item property.
This way you know what color is ordered (as line item properties are passed to cart/checkout and into order), inventory is kept right.
Benefit of this approach is that some themes support adding line item properties to product form, or there are multiple ways to add them.
Some will involve using “Custom liquid” blocks (search forum for line item properties) or you may use an app – but those product options apps will be cheaper than inventory sync apps (some may offer this functionality for free)…
Based on your example, it sounds like you don’t actually have separate inventory for each color variant. Instead, you have a total production capacity of 6 orders per week, regardless of whether customers choose Black or White.
With Easify Inventory Sync, you can set up a shared inventory pool between your variants. For example, instead of assigning 3 units to Black and 3 units to White, you can sync both variants to the same inventory source with a quantity of 6.
This means if customers order 5 Black and 1 White, the shared inventory will simply decrease from 6 to 0. Black won’t be marked as sold out after the third purchase because both variants are drawing inventory from the same stock pool.
What I like about this setup is that it works particularly well for made-to-order businesses where the limitation is your production capacity rather than the inventory of individual variants. It allows customers to freely choose whichever variant they prefer while still ensuring you never exceed your weekly order limit.
Shpofy does not support shared inventory natively.
The only workaround is setting both variants to 6 manually closing orders once you hit your weekly limit.
