Yarn shop - customisable yarn kit with real-time inventory syncing

Shopify Apps
1

I’ve looked all through the community topics many times, and there are several threads existing already for this question. But so far, I haven’t found an answer to this problem, nor have I found an app that can do exactly what I want. Some apps can do part of it, but none work completely. So here is the problem:

I own a yarn shop (knitting and crochet). As well as the yarn itself, I also offer a range of kits of sweaters that use yarns that I sell, so that customers can buy the yarn and pattern in one easy go. At the moment the only way I can do this is to ask them to check the stock levels for their size and then specify the colours they want in the comments box before checking out. Then I have to manually adjust the stock. It’s really not ideal, as too often customers just don’t check and ask for colours that are out of stock, or they just don’t specify anything at all as they don’t understand what to do. Also it relies on me adjusting stock quickly so that no-one else then tries to buy yarn that is already spoken for. I waste a lot of time emailing customers to clarify.

So for example: a sweater may require 2 different colours and be available in 8 different sizes, each of which requires a different amount of yarn per colour. The yarn used for the sweater may be available in 25 different colours. Customers should be able to choose their own colour combination and not be restricted to certain colours only.

So on the kit product page, they would first choose their size - this would determine how many balls of wool they need for each colour.

Then they would choose the main colour from a dropdown/colour swatch panel.

Then they would choose the secondary colour from a second dropdown/colour swatch panel.

When they choose their colours, this should somehow sync with the stock on the actual yarn product to make sure that they can’t choose a colour that doesn’t have enough stock for their size, and also to adjust the stock on the yarn product so that I don’t have to do it manually. This is an example (on a Shopify store) to show what I mean:

It seems that comments on these threads indicate that there are a lot of other Shopify merchants out there with yarn shops who need the exact same thing, so I’m surprised that no expert so far has tried to create an app and market it as I’m sure there would be plenty of interest in it.

I’d be interested in hearing from any other yarn shop owners who have found a solution (either via an existing app or with a custom app) or from any app developer who has made apps that can do this.

2

Hi @lainedesiles, the app Material Manager works well in this situation.

It lets you create an inventory of materials that are not customer facing. Then link those materials to a product variant specifying how much of it the variant uses. When one of those variants is sold it reduces the material inventory as well as the inventory of all other variants associated with the same materials.

For example for one of your sweater kits you would create create a product in Shopify, adding variant options for size and colour. With 8 sizes and 25 colours you will end up with 200 variants. The theme you are using will have a way to pick from different variant options.

You would then create a material in the app for each ball of yarn colour. Assigning each of your variants to the appropriate ball of yarn colour specifying how much it uses. For example a small orange sweater might use 2 balls of orange yarn and a medium orange sweater would use 3 balls.

3

For specific needs the only app that can ever meet ALL expectations is the one you build for your business to differentiate yourself and reap the benefits of less opportunity costs.

Hi @lainedesiles :waving_hand: @PaulNewton shopify-partner I provide a range of merchant solutions
Make sure to review how inventory availability works in shopify and turn on inventory tracking if not using it.
e.g. https://help.shopify.com/en/manual/products/inventory/setup/set-up-inventory-tracking

tl;dw try any run of the mill bundle app to view the problem different and try to present it differently.
Or kit apps, product-option apps, product personalization apps..
There’s also doing this as theme customizations where the “colours” are just product addons which is basically what the example website is doin; I’ve done similar builds using nesting cart items.

For bespoke sync scenarios that other sync apps can’t meet, use mechanic app.
Mechanic has some ready to go general tasks in their task library that can meet common needs otherwise you may need to script specific business logic:

They also have a cart to draft-order to checkout task that can be customized to fit these scenarios to hotswap items into the checkout so the product and it’s inventory is literally part of the order.
https://tasks.mechanic.dev/create-a-draft-order-from-the-cart

FTFY: Not how that works , some interest that’s specific to you does not make a viable business for a developer.
Now go out and get a list of 100+ such merchants details where each is ready and willing to pay for the app at X price overy Y time to recoup costs and make a profit and that’s something viable.
Or pony up the capital and build it yourself to sell to those other merchants if it’s such a gold mine.
Otherwise it’s nothing, and this is just a lack on inexperience in using generalize apps for certain process so in turn expecting others to provide overly specific unicorn solutions for your benefit that do NOT translate into a viable business for the one doing the actual work.

SHOW your work, which threads, which apps.
Otherwise you asking people to randomly guess and just repeating threads or apps you’ve already been through.
And then there’s the ad bots for product-option apps that FEAST on posts like this.
Avoid ambiguity, provide the detail you have before you UPFRONT to others, we are not mind readers nor see what you see. You have to tell us like we are 5 year olds.

Poor communication after putting in the effort is an EXPENSIVE habit when your so So SOOO close to being crystal clear; because a lot of merchants don’t even bother to research at all or even bother to provide a good example scenario.

The only app that can ever do EXACTLY what you expect is the custom ones you build yourself for your business.
Otherwise use what’s available off-the-shelf even if it means multiple apps until you can invest in better tools.

Your describing a bundle, use a bundle app, or a kit app, or some upsell apps with customization.
Or advanced theme customizations to present everything together in a custom frontend design UI but when it’s added to the cart, or at checkout time, a literal yarn product is added to the cart either at cost,free, or discounted.

This is solved by having the actual product put into the cart and in the admin the product having inventory tracked.
I get that that yarn is a separate product from the pattern+colors.
Yet something is bit off here as your describing a straightforward part of the process in a lot of personalization apps albeit to avoid increasing the customer-price the yarn or the variant would need to be set to be free or discounted.
And the example store is doing exactly this adding a literal separate product to the cart as part of the “kit”; whereby “kit” is just a presentation word and doesn’t actually mean anything.

Alternative inverting the kit problem IF the combinatorics of ALL products joined together is under 2k

READ: You’d do something like the following by redirecting/linking customers from product-they-chose-A to unlisted-product-meant-for-kit-building B

:bomb: :foot: :water_pistol::collision: This is for specific edge cases, or prototyping, it has SEO implications and UI customization requirements.
Test thoroughly, here be dragons :dragon_face: :world_map:

So those are all three product options currently.
Assuming the “pattern” is just the product title itself/sku.
Maybe try inverting the problem if you have a third option for the “pattern” you could just combine main-color and secondary-colour to be a singular option as the FIRST option.
e.g variant option NAME == 'Colours' & variant option VALUE == 'Red(Main) / Blue'
And set the product to be the main yarn color itself with pattern options as there are 2k variants allowed now.
Then you just have to keep the main colors less or equal to the secondaries; which can be a bit more managable in excel or even doable to sync in shopify-flow.

But the navigation,seo, and even search can be impacted if you have/present ONLY this singular product.
So need to have a way for regular products to point to such combined product, such as by adding a “customize” button/link to product pages, etc etc etc

Distilling the issue to sync variants within a singular product, instead of sync across ALL products and also ALL variants /shrug

4

@PaulNewton is right about the core issue. Most public apps are built around static bundles, while your case requires real-time inventory validation across multiple component variants driven by a parent option like size.

This quickly becomes a many-to-many inventory problem with race conditions, which most public apps intentionally avoid.

In practice, there are only two viable paths:

  • accept a simpler bundle setup with manual exceptions, or
  • build a private app that controls inventory reservation logic end to end.

Before choosing the second option, it is worth quantifying the cost of the current workflow: time spent on manual follow-ups and refunds versus the cost of custom development. If the losses are lower, a simpler setup may still be the rational choice.

5

Can’t you cut it into pre-made rolls? At least for the most popular colors/sizes…

That way you’re taking the guessing out of the equation and would be able to configure your inventory in real time rather than checking and then changing.

6

Thank you for your reply. Unfortunately I don’t think this would work according to your description. You say that the inventory of materials is not customer facing. That is the point I think that you’ve missed. The shop doesn’t only sell kits, its primary products are yarns that customers usually just buy as simple balls of yarn. The kits are complementary products that use the yarns that I sell. So the yarns are also customer-facing. Also, 8 sizes and 25 colours makes far more than 200 variants if the sweater has, as I described, 2 or more colours in it. With 2 colours you are looking at approx. 5000 possible variants. Please look at the linked example to see what I am looking for.

As I said, I have already looked at loads of apps, as most have already been mentioned in previous threads, including this one.

8

There are one or two apps which can sync inventory, however the only one which I initially thought would work won’t because of the quantities driven by the size, which it doesn’t allow for. I have now reached out directly to some other yarn shops that sell kits and have a set-up like I describe to see how they have achieved it. Hopefully someone will be able to help. I have no problem paying for a custom-built app if the price is reasonable, but would like a recommendation for a developer as there are thousands of them out there and I don’t really know what an acceptable price is for this. I don’t want to be taken advantage of or end up with someone cheap who isn’t that good!

9

No, this is yarn sold in balls or skeins of 50g or 100g. You don’t cut yarn up like fabric. The whole point is that I want customers to be able to choose the colours they want, and not limit them to specific colours.

10

Thank you for taking the time to write such a detailed reply. Although I do feel a bit like I am being told off in parts. I understand what inventory tracking is, thank you, and use it or not depending on the product I am selling.

I will look at Task Directory, it seems it might need a bit of time to get my head around it, but it may provide a solution.

Re. other requests already made for this - OK thanks, bit of a lecture. I understand this, however there are thousands of yarn shops around the world, most of whom would find this useful, and I think such an app could be used for other types of product too - I wouldn’t call this “unicorn”, just because knitting is something outside your area of experience. Given that I’ve found lots of other threads asking for this, I was simply wondering why no-one else had done it already. Maybe if I do finally have a custom-made app built I will discuss it with the developer.

Not sure why it is necessary to “show my work”? I’ve summarised what I need, which is exactly what others have asked for. But if it helps, here are a few of examples, where you can also see several responses from people who are looking for the same solution:

https://community.shopify.com/t/how-can-i-create-and-track-inventory-for-pattern-and-yarn-kits/14952 = this person said they made their own front-end app but then didn’t respond to people asking for more info.

https://community.shopify.com/t/need-app-recommendations-for-custom-yarn-kits-dynamic-pricing-weight-calculation/405361/2 - a developer suggested their app Easify, but as far as I can see, this doesn’t sync the inventory

Will continue in a second comment as forum will only allow me to post a max of 2 links.

11

Continuation of previous post:

https://community.shopify.com/t/how-can-i-create-product-bundles-with-variable-options-in-my-online-yarn-store/39815

This app does offer real-time syncing, but I already had a look at it, and it doesn’t offer a way to vary the quantities according to size selected:

https://apps.shopify.com/bundle-kit?search_id=d2adc8b2-8de6-4071-996b-e004180a7db3&surface_detail=bundles+kits&surface_inter_position=1&surface_intra_position=9&surface_type=search

Re. the last part about inverting the problem - I think this part is a bit over my head. Don’t really follow this, as I’m not a tech brain at all. However, I think it can be discounted as the number of variants would mostly be several thousand for any sweater involving more than one colour, and you say this would only work for a max of 2000, if I understand correctly.

12

Hi, I’m the one that stopped responding :slight_smile: I did build something custom, but it was never released to the public. In essence:

On the “main” product I added a custom field that had data about sizes, and for each size how many of which article numbers was needed.

In the frontend, this custom field was parsed with javascript and selectors and blocks with products were added.

The original “Add to cart” button was hidden and replaces with a custom one. If there was not enough stock to support the size and variant selected, the add to cart button was disabled. If there was enough stock, when clicking the add to cart button, it added all the products needed to the cart and a comment was added to the cart item to show it was part of a package.

In the cart, if the customer wanted to, they could mess up quantity and also delete items, but it never happened.

Hope this explains it!

13

Thank you so much for responding to this thread. That’s very useful to know - although I am not a developer and not really up to doing this myself, I’m working on finding someone who can and I’m sure this will help a lot.

14

I was thinking that creating bundles can be a solution to your problem, but, given that you offer big variety of yarns for these kits it would become difficult to create and manage. And not all themes support this many variants.

My next thing was along the lines of what Fillip did – add a front-end code which, based on customers selection will create a bundle out of existing products, basically will add to cart 1 “schema”, 2 balls of yarn1 and 6 balls of yarn2 (according to the schema).

Then it will be an answer and the only problem would be to ensure that this “prepared” cart is not altered by the customers on their journey to checkout.
I’ve built frontend-only things like this before, but they were a bit complex to configure, having an app should simplify configuration a lot.

But – there is a ton of bundle/product builder/product options/quiz apps in the Apps store, it’s not possible for a person to know functionality of all of them.

I’d try contacting them and explain the use case, that you need your options to come up from store product variants, and amount of items added depends on the size of main product selected…
I bet some of them has some kind of configurable logic/rules…

Would take some time though…

15

Thanks for answering. Bundles just don’t work - I’ve looked at plenty of apps, and the difficulty is always the size factor - meaning that the customer has to select a size and this determines the quantity of yarn needed for each colour. And this can lead to thousands of variants for one kit. No theme can support that many variants to my knowledge. Nor do I want that many. Some kits are very simple and have a one-size/one-colour option, so in theory are easy to configure, but that still raises the question of how to sync the stock with the yarn product.

It is clear that solutions exist, as some stores already have this functionality (see my example above). I asked another yarn shop owner that has this functionality, but her husband built the app specially for her store (which is both online and bricks and mortar, he built the POS too), so it’s very customised and not transferable (I am online only). As I have said before, I’m quite happy to pay someone to do this if the price is within my means, but I don’t know how to find someone good - there are just too many in Shopify experts, impossible to choose someone.

But I will try asking a couple of developers who offer existing bundle apps to see if they can offer something more customised.

16

Hello lainedesiles,

Did you find a solution for this yet?

I also own an online yarn shop and looking for the exact same solution.

17

Hi Andriz, no I haven’t yet found a solution, unfortunately I just haven’t had the time. I also suspect that this might end up being an expensive task and I don’t have much money to spare right now (who does?!).

18

Hi Andriz / lainedesiles,

Did either of you find a workable solution for this?

I’m researching this exact Shopify inventory problem: products or kits where each variant consumes a different amount of shared material stock.

For example, one yarn/material inventory pool, then different size/color variants deduct the right amount automatically.

Have existing apps like Material Manager, bundle apps, or inventory sync apps solved this cleanly, or is it still manual/expensive?

19

Hi Vishrut, no I haven’t found a solution. I haven’t really been actively looking again since I posted this thread - although these kits are an important part of my business, they still only account for a relatively small amount of turnover, so as a small one-person business I can’t justify spending thousands on a private developer to make an app for me. I have no computer proficiency myself. Existing apps in the Shopify app store haven’t solved the issue, if there is one that could then I haven’t found it.