“I want to sell a certain product where its inventory is shared among multiple products throughout my store.”

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Short Answer

You might classify this as a “product builder” or “product assembly.” This is best handled by using our “packages” feature. Packages are essentially a group of products. This is ideal for when you are selling a product made of various components, and each component has a limited inventory. You will have to plan ahead with regards to Attributes as they cannot be used as a standalone component of a package.

Detailed Explanation

Here is a real example (we are trying to keep it simple here): Let’s say that you are selling custom furniture sets. You want to sell individual products like tables and chairs, but you would also be selling those items as part of complete dining sets.

• Chairs
• Table

• Chairs
• Cabinets

As you can see, each set includes “chairs.” If you had a limited number of chairs (let’s say 20 in total) and wanted to keep track of inventory for them, then assigning an inventory of 10 to each set does not work well because once you sell 10 chairs from “dining set,” they wouldn’t be able to buy any more “dining sets,” even though you still had 10 of the same chairs available from the “kitchen set.”

So, the correct way to approach this:

1. Let’s instead create a new product called “table”
2. And another product called “chairs;”
3. Then put in inventory of 20 for the chairs.
4. Then lets create a new package (PRODUCTS > Create package) and call it “dining set.”
1. Now on this page you can add products to the package, so go ahead and add the table and the chairs that you just made.

Of course this example is very basic, so you could even get more specific and have attributes on these products, such as wood types oak, pine, mahogany; or table styles, etc…

Other real world examples may include custom made clothing where the fabric on-hand is used to create various items in your store; or, computers where each of the components may be used amongst various computer systems.

Other Notes:

Product combination disallowing:
Currently there is not a way to disallow specific combinations, such as this: you want to sell a computer. You allow them to select various monitors, and keyboards, but if they choose a certain type of monitor, then you want to automatically disable (or disallow) that combination with a certain keyboard (this is a very advanced feature that  you might see if you have ever shopped on a site like dell.com).

Displaying components for sell:
If you want to prevent customers from buying an individual component on its own(meaning, not part of a package), then you can assign it to a hidden category.