Inventory management for product variations

https://woocommerce.com/products/product-bundles/ will let you do this – there are other Bundle type plugins available too but I have used this one on a site that had a similar requirement and it worked well

CodeCanyon has a few: https://codecanyon.net/category/wordpress?term=product%20bundle – but you’d have to check with the authors to make sure it will do what you want!

hi Seank, that’s very interesting. i’m trying to understand how you used the plugin without paying $49, do you mind quickly explaining how you used it? it doesn’t seem meant for this, from the link you provided. i see the page says “Use bundled product stock reports to find bundles with insufficiently stocked contents” but no further info is provided.

is there a way to link product variations together across multiple variable products for inventory purposes without changing anything from the customer’s perspective? I don’t want to create product bundles at the moment, i just want to link the inventories between all “Blue medium” shirts, even though they’re different designs, and thus different products.

would love some any more detail that you can provide!

Unfortunately you have to pay for it – annually!

It wasn’t designed for this case – but it does work – the client I used it for supplies vehicle paint – they had various colours – eg Signal Red, Bright Red, Postbox Red that were all actually the same colour red. We set up a Red product with the various sizes (1, 2.5, 5 litre etc) and variations. Then each version of the red as a different product, set it as a bundled product and added the original red product as the only one in the bundle. That was the stock was handled by the original Red product – if it, for example there was only 1 tin of 5 litre left and someone bought some ‘Signal Red’ – it became unavailable in all of the others.

There isn’t a way to do it in the base WooCommerce as each product is a separate entity.

One way would be to have the shirt as a product with the colour/size variations and use something like https://codecanyon.net/item/woocommerce-extra-product-options/7908619 to add the design options. You’d have to pay for this but it’s a very reasonable $25. If you’re using the same designs for multiple products you can also set this one up to apply to all of them without having to edit each individual product. I think this might be the easiest way to go if you don’t need to do stock management on the design itself.

that sounds like a genius hack.

i agree it would be much easier to do it your second way, using the shirt as a product rather than the design. however, i don’t think this is a good fit for us, since we want to display our designs on our shop page, not shirt sizes and colors. also we have different product descriptions for each design. so essentially it would fix our inventory management, but would be awkward marketing-wise.

so i will try things your first way! sounds complicated but like a fantastic solution. thank you so so much for your help!!

one last question: do you happen to know if this method can interface with plugins such as ATUM that allow me to have multiple warehouses? i will keep inventory in both canada and the US, and need a way to track each seperately :/

There are a few product bundle plugins on here – one of them may work for you but most free ones have limitations – like a limited number of products in a bundle (not an issue in your case though) – or not able to use variable products which would be a problem!

ATUM works with standard Woo products and variations – so it may be possible – their support on here is very good too!

Hey seank, i actually found something very interesting! ATUM has an add-on called “Product Levels” (https://www.stockmanagementlabs.com/addons/atum-product-levels/ )… it looks absolutely perfect! And it should work with their Multi-Inventory add-on obviously. I’ll check that out too!

Thanks again for all your help.

Was just looking at that!

Yes – that does look like a good solutions – especially if you’re wanting the multi inventory bit as well!

Price is a bit of a bargain too considering what the whole plugin does!

i wanted to circle back to this, for yourself or anyone else interested. turns out that unfortunately (and very strangely) ATUM’s multi-inventory and product levels aren’t yet compatible… i was talking with the founder and he says compatibility will happen after september 2019

so i may end up coming back to your hack seank. alternativly i realized i can use SKUs to manage inventory accross multiple warehouses (i’m new to SKUs), which makes the “multi-inventory” plugin unnecessary and should work with the product levels plugin… except then i need a way to allow my woocommerce products to have 2 different SKUs and only show one based on location, which i doubt is possible, so i may need to create separate products for the US and Canada in that case…

it seems like options exist, just havent figured out an easy/great one yet. will keep the thread updated with my final decision once i figure it out. In the meantime, brilliant suggestions still welcome! ??

@rocketsam Did you come up with a final solution here? If so, can you share it?

hey Jesse, while waiting for ATUM to improve their product compatibility, i ended up going with the 2nd solution in my above post:

– bought ATUM product levels plugin
– created separate products for the US and Canada with separate SKUs. this is the worst part of the solution, it doubled my number of variations to ~1,300
– used a swatches plugin (from getwooplugins.com) to allow customers to manually choose their country (again not ideal, i wish this could be automatic from geolocation)

you can see the final result here: https://www.startbigtalk.com/product/bt007-mt/

i think seank’s suggestion would work as well – i went with this solution because it is future-compatible from when ATUM (hopefully) makes their products compatible, which would be the ideal solution.

i hope this helps! let me know if you come up with anything awesome that i missed ??

I’m going to mark this as resolved – if you have any further questions, you can start a new thread.