Product Sku

  • Hello all, I’m currently trying to control inventory by assigning a sku to a specific product variation. I sell T-shirts with “on demand” designs. I keep blank T-shirts and make them with design as needed. I need to control specific colors and sizes across my site. For example, if I sell a Medium Black T-shirt of one design, I need that medium black shirt to come out of the available stock for all products across the site. This will avoid customers being able to order any medium black shirts of any design if I sold the last one on a different design. I am running Woocommerce. Thanks for the help.

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)

  • That sounds like a handful…

    My thoughts would be a separate backend inventory system for the warehouse side of the operation. A spreadsheet would suffice for this inventory.

    Assign a blank shirt of a certain style, color, and size an SKU that would be formed from that style, color, and size with a letter to denote ‘Blank’ at the end.

    You could assign a percentage of the inventory of that SKU to the individual salable inventory items in Woo and an arbitrary backorder number which you’d derive from an ‘educated guess’ to prevent missing a sale where you had the inventory of ‘Blanks’ but the ‘sales by item’ said you couldn’t fulfill that.

    You’ll assign an SKU derived from the warehouse inventory for each salable printed item, at first you’d manually do a reconcilement of sold items to pre-production items where the required item for the production run reduces the ‘warehoused’ items by a one to one ratio. The spreadsheet will make this easy though it sounds a little involved.

    This gives you the control you need on the sales side, controls the actual inventory, and should be easy enough for a reconciliation (daily or twice daily would be my best guess to start) as needed. You’ll want to be cautious with the backorder numbers at first but those will help you move inventory around to fulfill orders you’d otherwise lose.

    As you go along you might hire a coder with spreadsheet and data tables experience to automate this whole system. But spend some time thinking it through and the manual upkeep should be surprisingly easy.

    Thread Starter depicted

    (@depicted)

    Thanks you for your response. The spreadsheet sounds like a great idea, I’m just not sure I want to tackle that upkeep at the moment. I was hoping I could just attach a sku to say… “Medium Black T-shirt” and have the inventory quantity updated for all Medium Black T-shirts across the entire online shop. For example…

    1 Medium Black T-Shirt available in stock.

    Customer #1 purchases Design (A) in Medium Black.

    Customer #2 will see that Design (B) in Medium Black T-Shirt is out of stock.

    Likewise, all designs offered will show that Size Medium in the color Black is unavailable to purchase since customer #1 purchased the last available one.

    I figured that was what you really wanted but I wouldn’t know where to start to modify Woo to do that and I doubt it could do so out of the box so I went back to my early days of making an inventory side of a storefront system work and came up with that.

    I do hope you find something I said helpful and maybe someone else has a better idea or someone else will see a market there (in the ‘maker’ community maybe) for an enhancement to make this work.

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
  • The topic ‘Product Sku’ is closed to new replies.