What is Inventory Group? How does Inventory Group Work?

Inventory Groups are collections of existing products (or variants) used to share the same inventory quantity(base inventory).

You can select and choose products (or variants) that goes into an Inventory Group manually (Manual Connected Groups) or Automatically by SKU Field (Smart Connected Groups by SKU)

How does Inventory Group Work?

When one of them is sold, the app helps to automatically reduce the inventory quantity of all other products (or variants) within the same group.

Inventory Group is especially useful for merchants who had created multiple products (or variants) on Shopify; but they all needs to draw (or share) on the same base inventory.

Let's say you have an inventory group consists of 3 products:

When customer buy one of Product #1, Product #1 inventory will be deducted by Shopify order. Connected Inventory will automatically reduce the inventory of Product #2 and Product #3. At the end, all 3 product has the same inventory of 9 in stock.

3 Products shows inventory at 9 doesn't mean that there are 27 in stock. This means the products under the same group with the same inventory level at 9.

As an example, we have an online store that has 100 black color blank T-Shirt. The blank T-Shirt can print either a Dog photo or a Cat photo. Naturally on Shopify, the store would create two different products: Black T-Shirt with a Dog Print and Black T-Shirt with a Cat Print. Regardless of which product that the store is selling, they only have 100 black blank T-Shirt they can sell. This is an example of different products drawing on the same base inventory.

The store has created an Inventory Group that contains the 2 Black T-Shirt products. Each has an inventory of 100 because the store has maximum 100 Black T-Shirts they can sell, although they can print either a Dog design or a Cat design on the Black T-Shirt.

When a customer makes a purchase of the first product Black T-Shirt with a Dog Print, the inventory will be reduced to 99 by Shopify as a default.

Since there is another products in the Inventory Group, Connected Inventory will automatically reduce each of the product by 1. All products in the Inventory Group is in sync with 99 inventory quantity.

💡 When you create a new Inventory Group, make sure all products (or variants) start with the same inventory quantity. You can do this easily with the Bulk Editor

Article How to Investigate Stock Movement? How to check who update my inventory? more for you to check the product inventory is deducted by Shopify order or Connected Inventory.