Said It Here

How to track inventory for custom made-to-order products without variants

Standard ecommerce listings force you to create a separate variant for every possible combination of options, creating unmanageable lists. Because these products are assembled after purchase from raw components like blanks and prints, traditional variant tracking makes it impossible to manage actual stock levels without building a manual separate system.

What people tried

Every workaround mentioned in the threads below. We haven’t tested any of them — and nobody here is claiming they worked.

  1. 1
    Manually keeping track of component inventory separately from the platform
  2. 2
    Using third-party product option apps
  3. 3
    Creating hundreds of individual product variants
  4. 4
    Manually keeping track of blank apparel inventory and subtracting it separately from Shopify
  5. 5
    Using Shopify Flow automation to trigger inventory adjustments on hidden blank variants
  6. 6
    Using a bundle app with component inventory tracking for a monthly fee
  7. 7
    Using quantity variants to create separate sub-SKUs for each quantity level.

In their words

Unedited, most upvoted first, each linked to the thread it came from.

“The problem I’m running into is inventory tracking.”source ↗

“This is where I’m getting stuck. I don’t really like the idea of having to maintain a separate inventory system manually, but I also don’t know if there’s a better way to structure this in Shopify.”source ↗

Alternative_Value836 · r/shopify · 5 upvotes

“I would be offering an almost-finished product, that would be completely unique. The customer would then chose two details from lists of options, and I would assemble/finish the product, and ship it. Any tries at this have resulted in a listing with more than one quantity.”source ↗

BellowYottle · r/shopify · 2 upvotes

“Currently, we have used a quantity variant, which makes a nightmare of SKUs, as each product has LOTS of sub-SKUs because of the quantities.”source ↗

tandrewg · r/shopify · 2 upvotes

“The problem I’m running into is inventory tracking.”source ↗

“This is where I’m getting stuck. I don’t really like the idea of having to maintain a separate inventory system manually, but I also don’t know if there’s a better way to structure this in Shopify.”source ↗

Alternative_Value836 · r/smallbusiness · 1 upvotes

Where this came up

r/shopifyr/smallbusinessecommerceinventory managementpricingshopify

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