Smart Inventory Management

Deutsch Diskussion Technische Fragen & Antworten
1

Hi There,

I‘ve an operational inventory management question and I hope you can help me out. Is there a software (or app) which can help me to manage inventory for a self-made dropship model?

Example: I am offering 5 white T-shirts with different logos. All are available in sizes S/M/L. However they are produced after they are ordered. So all take the same stock of blanc white T-shirts (without logo). If the inventory of blancs (example) in size L is 3 pieces, no matter which of the 5 logo Tees are sold, I want to show at all 5 “sold out” as soon as the order level of 3 pieces is reached.

Is that possible?

Thanks for you help!

Best,

jpwintjes

2

Hey @jpwintjes

Thanks for the great question and that is an interesting use-case. Firstly, this is the German community and we can chat about that here in German or in English, whatever you prefer. In case you wanna post your question in the EN community, this is the link here.

And you’ve given us a lot of insightful context. So basically you are running a just-in-time made-to-order POD shop and the t-shirts are a combination of different variants but all with the one combined stock in the backend. Once one Tee variant goes into checkout, all variants should show as sold-out if certain inventory levels are met.

So that’s where the native system may hit its limits, as the Shopify system sees each individual product master (product or variant) as its own entity and stock. In your case, what happens in your back office system and warehouse is a bit different to the way Shopify works. But let’s see what options we can still dig up.

Thus we have the product combined from 1 “blanc” as a unit on product-level in the backend and the 5 parts on a variant level in Shopify. As soon as one is sold on variant level, the product on product level should not be available anymore. So once a variant is sold you can consider two things here and important here is the difference between unavailable and sold out: Unavailable means that it is superficially unavailable on the website (by hiding or saving the product as draft or taking it out of the sales channel), while sold out means that the quantity is 0 in the backend inventory. So we can thus:

  • Superficially hide the products (variant images and dropdown options on the product page).
  • Or remove them completely from the inventory in the backend.

Manual workaround in backend inventory

As soon as a tee is sold in Checkout you get a “New Order” notification sent to your email. At this moment, you can go to the product list/master and in the Bulk Editor either remove the product from the sales channels and apps or put it in draft status. See the steps here taken from my German test store:

Or you hide the variants on the shopfront interface (but they still exist in the backend inventory). Since we have a few unsupported tutorials in hiding the variants from the product page (images and options in the dropdown):

Developer Docs:

Snippet to hide images

{% for image in product.images %}
  {% assign all_variants_hidden = true %}

  {% for variant in image.variants %}
    {% if variant.available %}
      {% assign all_variants_hidden = false %}
      {% break %}
    {% endif %}
  {% endfor %}

  {% unless all_variants_hidden %}
    Show image
  {% endunless %}
{% endfor %}

Then there are apps like Auto Hide Un‑hide Products that provide more control to hide the variants in the store.