Single inventory for all products

Question

I'm wondering what is the best way to accomplish inventory management for a magento store that sells custom made t shirts.

The store has several designs the user can choose to be printed on the t shirt (each design is currently registered as a configurable product). And user can choose color and size. So far it's all working great. The problem is that I want to control my stock of t shirt's size and colors and this inventory must be shared between all products. So independently of which design (product) was ordered the inventory should be reduce based only on the size and color ordered.

If I run out of size L blue t shirts it should set all products to out of stock for this particularly size and color.

Is there a way to do that?

Thanks.

Answer 1

Simple items can be used in multiple configurable products.

Create the shirts as simple items: Blue S,M,L,XL

Set the inventory for each of the attributes.

When you create a configurable product, such as design "Turtles", add the simple items Blue shirts in Associated Products.

Then, when you make another configurable product, such as "Toads", use the same simple items Blue shirts in Associated Products.

That would allow for a global inventory for the blue XL, blue L, etc..

So, if you had 100 Blue XL shirts, if someone ordered from Toad or Turtles, the inventory would drop for each configurable item ordered.