<h1>Sell Products in Bulk and Easily Keep Track of Your Total Inventory</h1>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<h3>Most important features</h3>
<p>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:</p>
<ol>
<li><strong>Variation quantity multiplier</strong> – Each variation has its own “<label for="wsvi_multiplier0">Inventory reduction per item sold</label>“</li>
<li><strong>Managed variation stock</strong> – Once the variation is sharing with other variations, its quantity is disabled for better control and to prevent human error</li>
<li><strong>Managed stock values</strong> – Automatically updates stock values for products & variations based on the total available stock</li>
<li><strong>Dedicated stock manager</strong> – Dedicated tab on product edit page for stock management</li>
<li><strong>Overselling prevention – </strong> Cart validation that prevents products from being sold if they exceed the total inventory</li>
<li><strong>Dedicated dashboard – </strong> Dedicated dashboard showing all variation groups and quickly manage stocks</li>
</ol>
<h3>Why Did We Develop This Plugin?</h3>
<p>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.</p>
<h3>How Do I Set It Up?</h3>
<p>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).</p>
<p>The steps:</p>
<ol>
<li>Enable the plugin</li>
<li>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</li>
<li>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</li>
<li>You’re all set.</li>
</ol>
<p><img class="alignnone wp-image-18734001401592 size-medium" src="https://woocommerce.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/Screen-Shot-2023-01-09-at-12.43.11-PM.png?w=620" alt="" width="620" height="317" /></p>
<h3>What Does This Plugin Do?</h3>
<p>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.</p>
<h3>For Example</h3>
<p>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).</p>
<p><strong>Without our plugin:</strong></p>
<p>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.</p>
<p><strong>With our plugin:</strong></p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<h3 class="p-rich_text_section">What You Can Do With It</h3>
<p>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.</p>
<p>Here is a few example of what can you do with it:</p>
<ol>
<li>Selling products in bulk at a discount, e.g. 1 chocolate bar for $2, 10 chocolate bars for $15.</li>
<li>Selling white label products, e.g. 100 customizable t-shirts, set up as variations for solid white, solid black, or graphic t-shirt.</li>
<li>Selling weight based products, e.g. 10kg of premium coffee beans, set up with variations for 100g, 250g, 500g, etc.</li>
</ol>
<h3><img class="aligncenter" src="https://woocommerce.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/1-1.png" alt="" width="800" height="auto" /></h3>
<h3>Solutions for Selling Products In Bulk</h3>
<p>If you want to sell products in different quantities (e.g. in single or in bulk), there are a few ways of doing it:</p>
<ol>
<li>Setup one variation per quantity you want to sell<br />
<strong>Pros</strong>: It is easier for customer to browse as well as for you to manage.<br />
<strong>Cons</strong>: N/A<br />
<strong>Conclusion</strong>: We recommend this solution.</li>
<li>Setup one product per quantity<br />
<strong>Pros</strong>: On the product list page (e.g. shop page or category landing page), the customer can see all available options right away.<br />
<strong>Cons</strong>: Most customers are interested in your product first and pricing/quantity options after.<br />
<strong>Conclusion</strong>: We do not recommend this option (unless you have unique business requirements).</li>
</ol>
<h3>Different Approaches to Bulk Selling and Why We Chose the Method We Did</h3>
<p>There are a few different approaches for sharing stock among products or variations:</p>
<ol>
<li>A centralized stock page for all sharing products & variations<br />
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.</li>
<li>Using a common product attribute to share stock between products<br />
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.</li>
<li>Using a variable product to manage shared stock<br />
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.</li>
</ol>
<h3>It Works Well With</h3>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://woocommerce.com/products/product-batch-expiration-tracking-for-woocommerce/">Product Batch & Expiration Tracking for WooCommerce</a>Variation Shared Inventory for WooCommerce is an inventory management system that allows a group of variations to share a single quantity.</li>
</ul>
<h3>Requirements</h3>
<p>Minimum PHP version: 7.0</p>
<h3 class="p-rich_text_section">Get started</h3>
<ul class="p-rich_text_list p-rich_text_list__bullet" data-stringify-type="unordered-list" data-indent="0">
<li>Purchase this extension</li>
<li>Download, install, and activate the extension, in your WooCommerce store</li>
<li>Review our <a href="https://woocommerce.com/document/variation-shared-inventory-for-woocommerce/">documentation</a> for any additional information</li>
</ul>
<p> </p>

Variation Shared Inventory

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

<h2><b>Track Your Products by the Batch and Keep Tabs on Their Expiration Dates</b><span style="font-weight: 400"> </span></h2>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400">Product Batch & Expiration Tracking for WooCommerce allows store owners to track their products stock through batches and sets of same expiration dates. Take control of your inventory and set up and track sub-quantities of your products in batches and/or expiration dates. </span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400">This breakthrough plugin allows store owners to keep track of their inventory, as parts of a whole, allowing them to oversee their products as a group of batches and a set of expiration dates. </span></p>
<h3><b>Who is this for?</b></h3>
<p>If you are running a <span style="font-weight: 400">WooCommerce</span> store that carries products with expiration date, e.g. food/edible, cosmetic, medicine, drink (tea, coffee etc.), or, from time to time you might need to recall your products. This plugin is for you!</p>
<p>Our batch tracking feature allows you to enter the batch number, batch date and vendor (if you are not the manufacturer) info, save them in your WooCommerce store. Later on, you can track your products’ batch info from the dedicated batch report dashboard. This is a great feature for food/edible manufacturer.</p>
<p>Our product expiry/expiration date tracking feature allows you to track your product’s expiration date, send you email notification of expiring products, as well as moving them into sales/clearance category automatically.</p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400">To sum up, our target audience is WooCommerce store owners who are looking to upgrade their inventory management by incorporating expiration date tracking, or expiration date tracking. By being able to track expiring products, better planning around promotions and sales can be done. In addition to expiration date tracking, there is batch tracking for store owners who are interested in being able to reference orders by a batch number.</span></p>
<h2><b>Most Important Features</b><span style="font-weight: 400"> </span></h2>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400">Product Batch & Expiration Tracking has a wide variety of features which allow you to manage inventory and keep yourself notified of any inventory with upcoming expiration dates. Using it will save you tons of time and money, which would normally be spent on keeping track of all the varying expiration dates of products on your store. Here’s a list of features: </span></p>
<ol>
<li style="font-weight: 400"><b>Product Batch & Expiration Tracking </b><span style="font-weight: 400">– When enabled each product will have its own batch tracking and expiration date tracking table.</span></li>
<li style="font-weight: 400"><b>Managed stock in Batches</b><span style="font-weight: 400"> – Manage and track product quantities using a batch system, assigning each batch an ID, a batch date, and a supplier name.</span></li>
<li style="font-weight: 400"><b>Managed stock by Expiration Date</b><span style="font-weight: 400">– Manage and track product quantities, using expiration dates, assigning each sub-quantity of your product an expiration date.</span></li>
<li style="font-weight: 400"><b>Expiration Report </b><span style="font-weight: 400">– Dedicated page that lists all currently existing records with expiration dates that are close to expiration.</span></li>
<li style="font-weight: 400"><b>Batch Report </b><span style="font-weight: 400">– Dedicated page that lists all currently existing batches sorted by their batch date.</span></li>
<li style="font-weight: 400"><b>Track Orders by Batch – </b><span style="font-weight: 400">Orders of products with batches set up, remember which batch was used and the batch can be searched for. </span></li>
</ol>
<p><img class="alignnone size-medium wp-image-8046927" src="https://woocommerce.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/PBET-Expiry-Report.png?w=620" alt="" width="620" height="250" /> <img class="alignnone size-medium wp-image-8046925" src="https://woocommerce.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/PBET-Batch-Report.png?w=620" alt="" width="620" height="227" /></p>
<h2><b>Additional Features</b><span style="font-weight: 400"> </span></h2>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400">In addition to the main features listed above, there are some additional features you can opt in to that can be configured in the settings. The settings page can be found by going to the products tab and clicking the “Batch & Expiration by Webis” sub-tab (Note that these settings require expiration tracking to be enabled). Here is the list of additional features: </span></p>
<ol>
<li style="font-weight: 400"><b>Display the Expiration Date </b><span style="font-weight: 400">– If this option is enabled, the expiration date will appear on the product page if a batch is expiring in a set number of days. </span></li>
<li style="font-weight: 400"><b>Receive Emails for Soon-to-expire Products </b><span style="font-weight: 400">– If this option is enabled, the plugin sends a notification email with a list of products that are expiring a set number of days from the current day.</span></li>
<li style="font-weight: 400"><b>Add to Clearance Category </b><span style="font-weight: 400">– If this option is enabled, when the expiration date of a product reaches a set number of days, the product is added to a set category.</span></li>
<li><strong>Shortcode to Show Batch Number and Expiry Date <span style="font-weight: 400">–You can use [wpbet_batch_expiry] shortcode to show batch number or expiry date wherever you want.</span></strong></li>
</ol>
<p><img class="alignnone wp-image-8147446" src="https://woocommerce.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/PBET-Settings.png?w=620" alt="" width="492" height="479" /></p>
<h2><b>Why Did We Develop This Plugin?</b><span style="font-weight: 400"> </span></h2>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400">As a store owner, we encountered the need to be able to track and record the expiration dates of our perishable goods like food products. We searched for existing solutions on the market but couldn’t find one that fulfilled the need in a straightforward and easy-to-use way. As a result, we developed this plugin to satisfy this need for expiration date tracking and we hope it can be of benefit to you as well. </span></p>
<h2><b>How Do I Set It Up?</b><span style="font-weight: 400"> </span></h2>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400">Once the plugin is enabled, in the product data section of the product edit page, under the inventory tab, there will be a section called “Product Batch & Expiration Tracking”. In that section, you can enable “Expiration & Batch Tracking”. Once you’ve enabled it, the batch table will appear underneath if the product type is simple and under each variation if the product type is variable. Within this table you can create new batch entries that are saved when the product is saved. </span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400">The steps: </span></p>
<ol>
<li style="font-weight: 400"><span style="font-weight: 400">Enable the plugin </span></li>
<li style="font-weight: 400"><span style="font-weight: 400">Go to the product edit page, go into the Inventory tab, enable the “Enable Expiration & Batch Tracking” option </span></li>
<li style="font-weight: 400"><span style="font-weight: 400">You can find the table in the Inventory tab if the product type is simple, and under each variation if the product type is variable.<br />
<img class="alignnone size-medium wp-image-8147450" src="https://woocommerce.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/PBET-Simple-Product.png?w=620" alt="" width="620" height="401" /><img class="alignnone size-medium wp-image-8147449" src="https://woocommerce.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/PBET-Variable-Product.png?w=620" alt="" width="620" height="405" /><br />
</span></li>
<li style="font-weight: 400"><span style="font-weight: 400">Fill in the table with the information about your batches. </span></li>
<li style="font-weight: 400"><span style="font-weight: 400">You’re all set to start tracking your batches! </span></li>
</ol>
<h2><b>How Can I Use the Shortcode?</b></h2>
<p>Shortcode [wpbet_batch_expiry type=”” order_id=”” variation_id=””] can render batch number or expiry date of the product variation that was ordered. It requires three parameter, type, order_id and variation_id. Type can be either <strong>batch_num</strong> or <strong>expiry_date </strong>depends on what you would like to show.</p>
<h2><b>What Can Our Plugin Do? (Use Cases)</b><span style="font-weight: 400"> </span></h2>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400">The </span><span style="font-weight: 400">Product Batch & Expiration Tracking for WooCommerce plugin allows you to track your product expiration date and batch numbers. You can also segment the product inventory into separate batches.</span></p>
<h3>For Example (Expiration Date Use Case)</h3>
<p>Say you have 100 bags of candy in stock, you purchased these 100 units in two batches. some of them are going to expire in 30 days, the rest of them are expiring next year.</p>
<h4>Without our plugin:</h4>
<p>You will need to ask your warehouse stuff constantly for each SKU in order to plan your clearance sales.</p>
<h4>With our plugin:</h4>
<p>Not only that you just need to go to the Expiry Report Dashboard to check the expiring products, you will also get email notifications regarding the expiring products. And if you setup the auto on sale feature, the product will automatically move into the clearance category (you can choose which category it is). These features will save you a lot of money from product wasting.</p>
<h3>Another Example (Batch Number Use Case)</h3>
<p>Say you sell chocolate cakes for years, and you just got notified by your supplier that, the last batch’s cakes are on the recall list. You want to notify your customers about this.</p>
<h4>Without our plugin:</h4>
<p>You will need to guess which orders contain the recalled cakes</p>
<h4>With our plugin:</h4>
<p>You can search orders by typing the batch number from the WooCommerce’s orders page. This will save you a lot of time.</p>
<p>There are much use cases of batch & expiry date tracking, and we pick<span style="font-weight: 400"> a few more use cases that our plugin can cover: </span></p>
<ol>
<li style="font-weight: 400"><span style="font-weight: 400">Track the expiration date of products, so that when the expiration date approaches a promotion can be held to clear out items before expiration.<br />
</span></li>
<li style="font-weight: 400"><span style="font-weight: 400">Track expiration dates for multiple shipments to clear out inventory in a FIFO system based on closeness to expiring.<br />
</span></li>
<li style="font-weight: 400"><span style="font-weight: 400">Recording inventory shipments as batches, in the case a recall becomes necessary and the orders involved with the inventory requiring a recall can be tracked. </span></li>
</ol>
<h2><b>A Comparison of the Different Possible Implementations of Expiration Date & Batch Tracking</b><span style="font-weight: 400"> </span></h2>
<p>As always, prior developing our plugins, we check to see whether the existing plugin can fulfill the features we want to fulfill. After testing the existing product batch tracking or product expiration plugins, we found that either some of the plugins are not working at all, or the setup configuration is overly complicated, or lack of features. That was why we developed this plugin for our own use case, as well as sharing with WooCommerce store owners and hope to help out stores like us.</p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400">To sum up, there are a few approaches to solving the product expiration date problem: </span></p>
<ol>
<li style="font-weight: 400"><span style="font-weight: 400">A centralized dashboard where you can create records for all products. </span><span style="font-weight: 400"><br />
</span><span style="font-weight: 400">The problem with this solution, is that it is overly complicated. When a store manager goes to update the stock of a product, they would normally go to the product edit page to make their changes. By adding another dashboard that they have to use to make records, the process becomes very inefficient and inconvenient. We prefer to remain the existing workflow for normal store owners, and not introduce million other places to setup the product.<br />
</span></li>
<li style="font-weight: 400"><span style="font-weight: 400">Use expiration date tracking to only track expiration date. </span><span style="font-weight: 400"><br />
</span><span style="font-weight: 400">Some plugins do handle expiration date tracking, but they usually only provide the default features like updating stock values, and simple features like displaying the expiration date. Our plugin offers much more in-depth features, for example, moving expiring products into sales/clearance category (you can select which category to go to), sending expiring notifications to store manager regarding the upcoming expiring products.<br />
</span></li>
<li style="font-weight: 400"><span style="font-weight: 400">Use expiration date tracking alongside batch tracking right on the product edit page, and have a dedicated dashboard for the report.</span><span style="font-weight: 400"><br />
</span><span style="font-weight: 400">This is our solution, and we believe that it is the most effective and complete solution.</span></li>
</ol>
<h3>It Works Well With</h3>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://woocommerce.com/products/variation-shared-inventory-for-woocommerce/">Variation Shared Inventory for Woocommerce</a><br />
Variation Shared Inventory for WooCommerce is an inventory management system that allows a group of variations to share a single quantity.</li>
</ul>
<h3><span style="font-family: proxima-nova, sans-serif">Requirements</span></h3>
<p>Minimum PHP version: 7.0</p>
<h3 class="p-rich_text_section">Get started</h3>
<ul class="p-rich_text_list p-rich_text_list__bullet" data-stringify-type="unordered-list" data-indent="0">
<li>Purchase this extension</li>
<li>Download, install, and activate the extension, in your WooCommerce store</li>
<li>Review our <a href="https://woocommerce.com/document/product-batch-and-expiration-tracking-for-woocommerce/">documentation</a> for any additional information</li>
</ul>

Product Batch & Expiration Tracking

<p>Track product batch & expiration date info, get email alerts on expiring products, auto add to clearance category for expiring products and search orders by batch number.</p>

Variation Shared Inventory vs Product Batch & Expiration Tracking