Need to use Product Inventory Level with Inventory Variants

[Brennan]

Re: Need to use Product Inventory Level with Inventory Variants

Hey Lea-ann

When using inventory variants you don't need to track inventory at the master product. You should either turn it off of the master product, or make it so hide out of stock is not checked. This will make it so that the product always shows and the attributes (variant products) will be hidden when they are out of stock.

It sounds like you want to hide the master product when all variants are out of stock. You would need to use an alternative method to do this like moving it to an out of stock category which is hidden.

There may be a way to make this work with Stone edge, however I have never tried this so i'm not 100% sure it it will work. If you also tracked inventory of the master product SKU in Stone Edge and made it be the sum of all the variant inventory when you sync inventory with Miva, it will update all the variant inventory, but also update the master product with an inventory count, which would be the sum of all the variants. When all variants were sold, Miva would also hide the master product since you are also tracking inventory on it. In that case you would want to track inventory on the master product in Miva, and have Hide out of Stock product turned on. This is all assuming Stone Edge has a way to give the master product an inventory count that is the sum of its variants.

[mikey]

Re: Need to use Product Inventory Level with Inventory Variants

I have a way of doing it, but not in an automatic realtime fashion. I run a set of queries on our Order Manager DB which gives me two files which I upload in the morning after we batch our orders. I may run it again in the afternoon if needed(big shipment arrives or other stock change).

The files I get are....
1) Non-attribute SKUS - Active or Inactive
2) Attribute Skus - QOH

It is actually a pretty complicated set of queries because of the way we sell items. We have stock on single pieces, but also sell those items as Dozens and Cases. When we started selling items with attributes it REALLY became complicated. It recursively looks at the KIT table and determins if there is enough stock to fill the SKU and sets it active. This also works on Products with attributes that are made up of kits. (you can have an attribute Sub SKU setup as a kit of another inventoriable SKU)

An example would be we 13 pcs of Widget A with Color Blue. The query will have 13 single pieces available and ONE dozen available. To the MM store there is 13 singles + 1 dozen available, OM only has 13 available.

It would be possible for someone to order a dozen, and then people order the single pieces. putting stock negative when batched.

Usually we can get more stock in a few days and call the customer who ordered second and delay the shipment. Been working for us.

[mdurkee]

Re: Need to use Product Inventory Level with Inventory Variants

It sounds like you want to hide the master product when all variants are out of stock. You would need to use an alternative method to do this . . .

Is there any functionality, possibly in toolkit, that would sum the inventory of all the variants and update the inventory for the master product?

[kayakbabe]

Re: Need to use Product Inventory Level with Inventory Variants

I can think of several way to tackle this..

You might could exploit toolkits waitlist feature. Instead of using it to do an actual waitlist... it can check on variants and add a button to add to waitlist.. you could just put in different code in the if statement for waitlist and move that if statement around to where you need it.

You can look at the variant array feature of toolkit (it requires that your variants are actually real products, there are two ways to create variants in the store... you will have to read it I didn't dig too hard).

or...
I would think if you are comfortable with mysql queries, you could use the above to do what you suggest.
add all the qty of assigned variants together and if 0, run a mysql query on the product table that would add it to a hidden category (out of stock OOS) I imagine you would NOT want to remove the other category assignements... so to really hide the product.. you could add some code to see if a product belongs to the OOS and conditionally to hide the product in the ctgy, smap, srch and other places...

I know one of the reasons, I gave up on using variants tied together to a 'master' product, is because it wouldn't hide the master product if all the variants were out of stock. (just one of the reasons, because of other reasons it wasn't worth the effort to do the above)

[mdurkee]

Re: Need to use Product Inventory Level with Inventory Variants

Thank you so much for taking the time to give me these ideas. I have been buried lately and haven't had a moment to look into these possibilities.
I sell t-shirts so due to the many styles, sizes, colors, I use the attribute template feature to manage the sizes and colors as well.
Still, there should be a way to deal with this as well as a search feature.
I appreciate your help. Thanks again,
Maxanne