Inventory as it relates to parent & child items

[Patd265]

When we have a clothing parent item with say 4 child size items (S,M,L,XL) and each of the size items has inventory qty 2, should the main parent item not automatically show 8?
Meaning, should the main item inventory not be defined by however many size items there are?

[delcorsets]

I often wished it would work that way, but it does not. Also, it would seem sensible that every time a child/variant product sold then 1 would be subtracted from the parent/master product thus bringing it to 0 (and hiding it from being displayed,) when all child/variant products are sold out - but again, doesn't work that way. The variant product inventory and the master product inventory do not affect each other.

I suppose there might be use cases where it's helpful to keep these inventory levels unrelated.. but, it's been a dream feature for me for a long time. There have been posts about this for a long time, but I don't know of another way to stop master products from being displayed in categories, search results, etc when all variant products are gone, other than tracking master product at an inventory level of 0 and selecting to hide.

See: https://www.miva.com/forums/forum/on...ntory-variants

Edit: I do currently have a "Sold Out" button that appears on the product page when all variants are sold out (and I've forgotten to set master product level to 0,) but I'd still like a way to hide those products to prevent customer frustration from seeing the products, clicking into the product page, and then discovering there are no more in stock.

[Kent Multer]

I'm curious why you folks want this capability. If I'm shopping for a shirt in size Large, I want to know whether you have Large in stock. I don't care how many you have altogether. If Large is out of stock, I might want to know if you have any Medium or XLarge as a fallback choice; but again, the total for all sizes is not useful.

That being said, if you really want to display the total, it can be done with some custom template code. It's also possible to show the in-stock counts for all the sizes, which can be helpful to shoppers in some cases.

[Patd265]

Kent Multer my thinking about this came from looking at products in google (merchant center). GS see that master product with 0 inventory and basically disapproves it for "Inconsistent value (page crawl) [availability]". Inconsistent, according to GS, because the item shows InStock on the website due to the product defaulting to the first attribute /size.

[Kent Multer]

How does Google get the zero count for the master product? Computing the total count for all variants can be done with template code, or possibly with a small module. Then it should be just a question of putting the number in the right place so that Google will pick it up.

Or maybe you can "trick" Google into picking up the count for the first variant that shows up on the product page, instead of for the master. That might be easier.

[Patd265]

Kent Multer ah yes ... the why and how does google what it does. Way above my level that is.
I think one has to be ordained, or something, into the mysterious ways of the google gods.

[lesliekirk]

How does Google get the zero count for the master product? Computing the total count for all variants can be done with template code, or possibly with a small module. Then it should be just a question of putting the number in the right place so that Google will pick it up.

Or maybe you can "trick" Google into picking up the count for the first variant that shows up on the product page, instead of for the master. That might be easier.

Google uses

Item group ID [item_group_id]

for the Master Product. The question I have is how do you correctly tell Google that a product has a Master Product code? My bigger question is how do you correctly tell Google about the variants it is supposed to associate with the Item group ID?

[lesliekirk]

Let me toss something out that I'm pretty much WAGing at on how to use

<mvt:if expr="NOT ISNULL l.settings:record:variant">

//output variant data records here

</mvt:if>

Would this be something to use to pull in the variant ID?

For the feed ID field maybe something like this?

<mvt:if expr="NOT ISNULL l.settings:record:variant">
&mvt:record:variant:code;
<mvt:else>
&mvt:record:code;
</mvt:if>

[Mark Hood]

There was only one other native way of doing this that I know of and I have asked for a better way many times as well...
You can add the master part to the variant and have it work this way (At least it will subtract one when you sell the variant)