Hi folks. I’m looking for some advice on the best approach to supporting our made-to-order clothing business in Shopify. As I’ve posted elsewhere in the forum, we use production “slot” model rather than managing finished goods inventory.
What’s the best implementation path? I’m optimizing for giving us adequate control, since we depend on this working, and for reasonable performance when we have rapid sales of a popular, low-production item.
What I’m looking for from Shopify is to be able to manage a pool of inventory against a SKU that is shared across multiple products and variants. For instance, if I have enough fabric to make 20 jackets, then I need to decrement inventory for all variants made from that fabric, every time a sale is made for one of them. If I make a women’s and a men’s pattern in that jacket and offer 7 sizes in each, for a total of 14 variants, when one of the variants is sold I need to decrement inventory in the other 13 for that sale. Shopify decrements inventory available for the variant sold, and I need to find a way to adjust the others.
I need some help, as I’m hitting some interesting dead ends. I’ve been working through various scenarios, trying to come up with an approach that is straightforward to implement and also performant. My experience with the platform is dated, and I’m still coming up to speed on the changes made in the past few years; my apologies if I’m asking naive questions or making bad assumptions.
Thanks! I’ll add some more notes about things I’m trying in replies.