Smarter Shopify Inventory: Taming Variants and Shared Stock

Streamlining Inventory for Products with Variants: A Community Perspective

We've all been there, right? Wrestling with Shopify's inventory system, especially when you're dealing with products that come in multiple sizes, colors, or styles. It can feel like you're spending more time managing stock than actually growing your business. Recently, a fellow store owner, Murli100, sparked a great discussion in the Shopify community about this very issue, and it's clear they're not alone in feeling the pain. Let's dive into the challenges and, more importantly, the solutions that came out of that conversation.

The Variant Inventory Headache

Murli100 highlighted two key frustrations. First, the tedious process of enabling inventory tracking for each individual variant. Imagine having dozens of products, each with several variants – that's a lot of clicks and saves! They pointed out that for just 21 products with 4-5 size variations, it meant a whopping 87 individual saves. Ouch!

The second pain point? Managing shared inventory across variants. Think about limited edition prints, where you have a fixed number available, regardless of size. Currently, Shopify forces you to pre-allocate stock to each size, which means guessing what your customers will want. It's like trying to predict the future!

Solutions from the Community

Thankfully, the Shopify community is full of bright minds willing to share their expertise. Peter_Kim jumped in with some fantastic advice, offering both native Shopify solutions and app recommendations.

Bulk Editing to the Rescue

For the first problem – enabling inventory tracking – Peter_Kim reminded us about Shopify's built-in bulk editing feature. It's a bit hidden, but incredibly powerful once you know where to look. Here's the breakdown:

1. Select the products you want to track inventory for and click "Bulk edit".
   
   
2. Show the “Track quantity” column from Columns > Inventory > Track quantity. Then select the entire column to check all the checkboxes at once.
   
   

This simple trick can save you a ton of time. It's not quite the product-level toggle Murli100 suggested, but it's a huge improvement over individual variant editing.

Shared Inventory: Thinking Outside the Box

Now, for the shared inventory challenge, things get a bit more interesting. Shopify doesn't natively support a shared inventory pool across variants. Peter_Kim suggested a clever workaround using the Bundles Inventory app. The idea is to create a "dummy" product that represents your total available stock. Then, you configure your actual product (with variants) as a bundle that draws from this dummy product's inventory.

Here's how it works:

1. Create a dummy product which will be used as a shared inventory, and exclude it from all sales channels (or, you can set its status to draft).
   
   

2. Create the product that will be listed in your online store.
   
   

3. From the app, configure this product as a bundle. Here, the dummy product is assigned as a component to each variant of the bundle product.
   
   

4. When the bundle is created, the app calculates and updates inventory for each bundle variant, as well as price and weight. Whenever any variant is sold, the dummy product’s inventory is deducted, and the inventory of all other variants will be updated accordingly.
   
   

It's a bit of a workaround, sure, but it addresses the core need for a shared inventory pool. Other apps might offer similar functionality, so it's worth exploring your options in the Shopify App Store.

While Shopify might not have a perfect, out-of-the-box solution for every inventory scenario, the community always comes through with creative solutions. By leveraging bulk editing and exploring app options, you can definitely tame those variant inventory headaches and get back to focusing on what you love – growing your business.