Variation Shared Inventory for WooCommerce v3.3

Variation Shared Inventory for WooCommerce is an inventory management system that allows a group of variations to share a single quantity.

Sell Products in Bulk and Easily Keep Track of Your Total Inventory​

Variation Shared Inventory for WooCommerce allows store owners to collectively manage their product’s stock when selling the same product in various quantities. Sell your items in groups of any amount, and track those groups in the total inventory.

This innovation allows store owners to track their total inventory, even when items are sold in multiple bulk quantity variations, and easily integrate the bulk sale of products.

Most important features​

Variation shared inventory has easy-to-use methods to allow you to manage inventory for sharing stock among variations. Using it will save you tons of time on managing individual stock values and provide a better shopping experience for your customers which can lead to higher sales. Here’s a list of features:

1. Variation quantity multiplier – Each variation has its own “Inventory reduction per item sold“
2. Managed variation stock – Once the variation is sharing with other variations, its quantity is disabled for better control and to prevent human error
3. Managed stock values – Automatically updates stock values for products & variations based on the total available stock
4. Dedicated stock manager – Dedicated tab on product edit page for stock management
5. Overselling prevention – Cart validation that prevents products from being sold if they exceed the total inventory

Why Did We Develop This Plugin?​

As a store owner ourselves, we found it very difficult to track inventory when selling different quantities of products. We searched for existing solutions on the market but couldn’t find one that solved the issue in a simple and straightforward way, hence we have developed this plugin ourselves to solve this bulk quantity issue and we hope it can solve yours as well.

How Do I Set It Up?​

Once this plugin is enabled, in the product data section of the product edit page, there will be a new tab called “Shared Variation Inventory” where you can enable the “Shared Variation Inventory” option for this product. Once you’ve enabled it, in the “Quantity Manager” section, you can group the variations that you want to share inventory for, enter the total stock of this group, and give the group a label. You can create as many groups as you need (e.g. Variations A & B are different quantities of Peach Candy and Variations C & D are different quantities Apple Candy).

The steps:

1. Enable the plugin
2. Go to the product edit page, find the tab “Shared Variation Inventory”, enable the “Shared Variation Inventory” option
3. For all variations you’d like to share inventory for, fill in the “Inventory reduction per item sold” field and turn on the “Manage stock?” option
4. On the quantity manager section, select the variations you want to group, enter the total quantity and if you’d like a group name as well
5. You’re all set.

What Does This Plugin Do?​

This plugin allows you to share the total stock (e.g. 100 units) of a product internally among its variations (e.g. variation A sells by single units, variation B sells in groups of 10 units), and control the total product stock in a centralized section.

For Example​

Say you have 100 bags of candy for sale, and you want to sell the candy as singles as well as in bulk amounts of 10, you can set it up so that variation A sells by 1 bag and variation B sells by 10 bags (1 box).

Without our plugin:

You would need to split your 100 units and manually allocate and manage stock for the two variations. The problem with this setup is that the variations might sell at different speeds resulting in one of the variations showing up as out of stock while there is still stock left.

With our plugin:

You can simply put down 100 as the total stock. On your storefront, the product page would show that there are 100 units available for variation A and 10 units available for variation B. Then, if 50 units of variation A are sold, your total product stock becomes 50, which updates the stock of variation A to 50 and the stock of variation B to 5.

Our Variation Shared Inventory for WooCommerce plugin also prevents your products from being oversold. In the above example where the total product stock is 100, your customer can’t checkout with 51 units of variation A and 5 units of variation B as it would total to more than 100 total units.

What You Can Do With It​

The Variation Shared Inventory for WooCommerce plugin automatically synchronizes the inventory for variations that share the same total stock, effectively managing your stock for you. When you manually change the total stock of a product, it will automatically update stock quantity of each variation in that group as well.

Here is a few example of what can you do with it:

1. Selling products in bulk at a discount, e.g. 1 chocolate bar for $2, 10 chocolate bars for $15.
2. Selling white label products, e.g. 100 customizable t-shirts, set up as variations for solid white, solid black, or graphic t-shirt.
3. Selling weight based products, e.g. 10kg of premium coffee beans, set up with variations for 100g, 250g, 500g, etc.

Solutions for Selling Products In Bulk​

If you want to sell products in different quantities (e.g. in single or in bulk), there are a few ways of doing it:

1. Setup one variation per quantity you want to sell
   Pros: It is easier for customer to browse as well as for you to manage.
   Cons: N/A
   Conclusion: We recommend this solution.
2. Setup one product per quantity
   Pros: On the product list page (e.g. shop page or category landing page), the customer can see all available options right away.
   Cons: Most customers are interested in your product first and pricing/quantity options after.
   Conclusion: We do not recommend this option (unless you have unique business requirements).

Different Approaches to Bulk Selling and Why We Chose the Method We Did​

There are a few different approaches for sharing stock among products or variations:

1. A centralized stock page for all sharing products & variations
   There are plugins that provide a dedicated page for all the products & variations that are sharing stock, but the problem is that, it is overly complicated. When a store manager would like to make changes to a product, they would normally go to product edit page to make their changes. By adding another dashboard that they have to use to make changes, the process becomes very inefficient and inconvenient.
2. Using a common product attribute to share stock between products
   This solution sounds good at first, but when you have a large catalog (e.g. 100+ products), attributes often need to be reused, which this method does not support.
3. Using a variable product to manage shared stock
   This is our solution, and we believe that compared to the other shared stock solutions out there, it is the easiest solution to setup & manage by far.

It Works Well With​

• Product Batch & Expiration Tracking for WooCommerceVariation Shared Inventory for WooCommerce is an inventory management system that allows a group of variations to share a single quantity.

Requirements​

Minimum PHP version: 7.0

Get started​

• Purchase this extension
• Download, install, and activate the extension, in your WooCommerce store
• Review our documentation for any additional information