Managing Inventory with product bundles

[Retropilot]

We sell stickers. I sell the stickers individually, and I also sell those same stickers in 'packs' to help customers buy all the stickers related to a particular theme rather than adding them individually to their cart. I would like to know how I can manage sticker inventory in this case.

For example, let's say I have released five stickers - A, B, C, D and E. They are available individually, or together as a pack.

Customer 1 purchases Stickers A and B individually, and someone else purchases the pack.

I would like an app that recognises the total inventory sold in this case. At the moment Shopify only tells me that I have sold 1 of A and B, and then 1 of the 'pack' (without recognising the individual elements of the pack), so my overall inventory count isn't accurate.

[Nitin_Kujur]

If I am getting it correct your bundle product is different for your individual products in that case both will be having separate inventory values.

To keep it in sync you can use the Mechanic app to achieve your requirements. After Installation please reach to app author Isac he'll help you in creating an automated script for this.

What script will do:

If bundle of (A, B, C ...) will be purchased then script will run automatically and will reduce purchased Quantity from Individual product inventory of A, B, C....

[Risa]

@Retropilot 

App Selly displays products in bundle without creating a combined product:

https://selly-demo.myshopify.com/collections/frontpage/products/florals-square-neck-criss-cross-bow-tie-back-dress

https://selly-demo.myshopify.com/pages/bundle

This way, the inventory is always counted correctly.

https://apps.shopify.com/selly

[jeriwambeek]

Hi Retropilot, 

I hope you are well and keeping safe in these crazy times. 

Selling products as bundles and difficulty managing the inventory is a common problem for businesses like yours. I see it all the time. 

There are apps that you can use within Shopify like others have written that enable you to "pick" products easier, but that doesn't solve the inventory piece well. Especially when it comes to forecasting and needing to see how many products you have sold individually as well as those same products within the same bundles. 

I am the Cheif Solutions Architect and co-founder of WhichAddOn - I literally help businesses like you solve these problems daily. If you want to arrange a free Discovery call with me to understand how to solve these issues, please reach out to me on the chat on WhichAddOn.com or book a free Discovery call here: https://meetings.hubspot.com/jeri1

Looking forward to chat to you. Stay safe!

[GradenTalunFarm]

I am here because I had a very similar question and this thread popped up. I'm a garlic farmer who sells garlic in quarter pound, half pound, and full pound increments. It's a nightmare to have accurate inventory, because obviously I pick the orders on demand and am willing to sell in any of those increments. If I have 15 lbs of a specialty type, I want to be able to upload that inventory to Shopify and have it correctly "draw down" as orders are made, whether it's .25 lbs here, .5 lbs there, etc. It's essentially the same problem- as long as it didn't look clunky on the user's end, I'd be happy to upload inventory in universal quarter lb units and just have a half pound order consume 2 units of inventory, full lb consume 4, etc. I am a small scale business and can't justify a crazy expensive app, is there something that would solve this? It's important to me that on the customer's end, they don't see the nightmarish end of it. I want people to buy larger volumes and on their end, they need to be able to easily comparison shop with other garlic farms that sell in those same units. They need to have a dropdown menu to see their increments, while on my backend, the 15 lbs of total inventory is tracked accurately so I don't end up "out of" quarter lb units, while still having half pounders for sale. As a stop-gap mechanism, I've been forced to enable sales even when inventory is zero, which results in a lot of hands on tinkering product by product- a nightmare with over 100 products.

[chenster]

Why would half pound order consume 2 units of inventory not 1 unit? Have you tried any inventory app?

[Tahar]

Hi,

That sounds like a challenge any bundling app can deal with (if you want to go with a cheap option). You basically need to have one unpublished product which is in your basic size/weight. In your case, I would go with a basic product weighing 0.1 lbs. The finished product would have variants with option "Weight", option values would be "0.25 lbs, 0.5 lbs and 1 lbs". The 0.25lbs variant would hold 25 units of 0.1 lbs and so on. The only issue with the above solution is that selling 0.25 lbs of garlic will automatically draw 25 units out of the basic product which will also draw stock from 0.5 lbs and 1 lbs products. 

If you want to go beyond the simple workflow and manage both the raw stock and the finished goods then a simple manufacturing workflow would do well. For example, you can have a container that holds all the raw materials. You then need to have bundles just like explained above but instead of having the system automatically fill up the quantities of all products, you would use production orders to manually build in your inventory out of the raw material. This will allow you to have separate stock for 0.25, 0.5 and 1 lbs units while keeping a close eye on your container's stock levels and the production orders you need to run to fill up the different weights. You can read more about manufacturing workflows here: https://www.stockandbuy.com/help/manufacturing/

I hope this helps. 

Tahar

[GradenTalunFarm]

Hi, thanks, that is a helpful idea. If I can find a free or cheap bundling
app, that would do the trick. Good idea on the .1 lb unit, brilliant. That
would be easy to upload, too.

[xtrader07]

That's a great answer.

What about if I sell tshirts.

And I sell bundles of 3, 5 and 10 Tshirts in a different package?

So I keep inventory of 1 unit T shirts.

But I want to sell bundles of 3,5 and 10, but once I sell those, I remove them from the inventory.

Thanks!

[chenster]

---

@Tahar wrote:

Hi,

That sounds like a challenge any bundling app can deal with (if you want to go with a cheap option). You basically need to have one unpublished product which is in your basic size/weight. In your case, I would go with a basic product weighing 0.1 lbs. The finished product would have variants with option "Weight", option values would be "0.25 lbs, 0.5 lbs and 1 lbs". The 0.25lbs variant would hold 25 units of 0.1 lbs and so on. The only issue with the above solution is that selling 0.25 lbs of garlic will automatically draw 25 units out of the basic product which will also draw stock from 0.5 lbs and 1 lbs products. 

If you want to go beyond the simple workflow and manage both the raw stock and the finished goods then a simple manufacturing workflow would do well. For example, you can have a container that holds all the raw materials. You then need to have bundles just like explained above but instead of having the system automatically fill up the quantities of all products, you would use production orders to manually build in your inventory out of the raw material. This will allow you to have separate stock for 0.25, 0.5 and 1 lbs units while keeping a close eye on your container's stock levels and the production orders you need to run to fill up the different weights. You can read more about manufacturing workflows here: https://www.stockandbuy.com/help/manufacturing/

---

Did you mean 0.01lb a basic product weight? 

[Tahar]

Hey! 

Sorry, just saw your answer. Things are getting a bit hectic as we are going into another lockdown :'(

Yes, correct. You need to track your raw materials in the smallest possible unit of measure. This is so that you can easily build whole quantities of your finished goods. 

I hope this helps. 

/Tahar

www.stockandbuy.com / simple, powerful inventory management for Shopify.

[Tahar]

Hey! 

Your use case is a lot easier to solve and any bundling app would do the trick for you. All you need is to have a shirt, a pack of 3, 5 and 10 shirts. In total, that's 4 products. 

Each pack of shirts would bundle a certain quantity of the single shirt product. This way, selling any of the packages would automatically change the inventory levels of the other items.

I hope this helps.

/Tahar

www.stockandbuy.com / simple, powerful inventory management for Shopify.

[Emilia7]

@Retropilot Did you find your solution? It’s been quite a while but I’m leaving a possible solution that might be helpful for others too. Your requirements match the features of the MultiVariants - Bulk order app.

You need to create a product from the Shopify end and under the product, create variants for the A, B, C, D, and E stickers. Now, through Multivariants your customers can pick individual variants or together as a  pack according to their choice.

The inventory will be automatically updated following the purchases made by your customers whether they pick individual variants or as a bundle. With this app, It’s possible to set minimum-maximum quantity per variant, limit variants, and minimum-maximum order value to specific products or groups of products.

Here is a Demo product. Also here is the Demo store with different features of bundles.

MultiVariant bulk order