Combo Pack Functionality?

Reid Young — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 00:26:57 +0000

I'm looking for a better way to sell "combo packs" of products from my store. Our current method (creating an independent product page) wreaks absolute havoc on our inventory system -- unless we update each item's inventory by hand every time we sell a combo pack, it's impossible to know how many individual products we actually have in stock.

It seems like the most straightforward solution would be to create a 'pseudo product' which automatically deducts inventory from its respective parts. For example, if you buy a hat+shirt combo, the qty of both hats and shirts decreases by one.

Is this the kind of problem which could be solved with an app? I'm not sure what kind of constraints Shopify's API imposes.

Thanks!

Jesse Storimer commented

Jesse Storimer — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 12:52:51 +0000

Reid,

I think this would be possible with an app. Not sure if you are looking for a technical answer or not, but here is one way that it could be accomplished.

Create each combo pack as a separate product with its own product page, and set its quantity to be the minimum of its two parts (eg. if a hat has 5 in stock and the shirt has 3, this combo's inventory would be 3).

Then you could set up a web hook to notify a Shopify app whenever an order is made (http://wiki.shopify.com/WebHook). If the order was for this combo pack product, you could decrease the inventory from both the hat and shirt using the API, without any manual work.

It's not an ideal solution but technically it should work.

Reid Young commented

Reid Young — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 06:55:22 +0000

Very cool Jesse -- that makes perfect sense, I'll talk with my developer about it. Thank you!