I’m building a few websites for brewery clients of mine and I have a question about how Breww integrates with WooCommerce from an inventory perspective.
The clients all have a similar need: they want Breww to contain their master stock level and sell their beers over WooCommerce.
We’ll be setting up the products - in this case we’ll call it Breww IPA - so that they can be purchased in the following ways:
- Variable Product (containing bottle, 6x500ml and 12x500ml)
- As part of curated bundles
- As part of a Build a Box Bundle.
I’ve added some code which enables stock multipliers so that the variable product versions (i.e: 6x500ml) deduct the amount of single bottles being order (i.e: 6 rather than 1, as WooCommerce usually treats a variable stock item as one item, regardless of whether the attribute you give it is ‘6’).
I presume, regardless of how the Breww IPA is bought, it will deduct that amount of bottles from the master stock in Breww as long as we use the stock multipliers?
If you wanted to split off single bottles for webshop sales and cases for wholesale, how does that work from a WooCommerce/Breww perspective?
Thanks,
Nick
We recently started selling via Woo a few months ago so I can give you some insight:
You don’t need to use “multipliers”. You can set up each product separately in Breww, linked to the same parent beer.
i.e. 1 x 500mL bottle is your basic “smallpack”, which has a bottle, lid and maybe label set in its inventory.
Then you have a 6x500mL “multipack” product that uses the correct number of bottles/lids , but might also have extra items like a cardboard caddy or whatever - and these are set to “use when assembled”.
Same for the 12x500mL (you might have 2x caddies plus an outer box for these or something like that).
You create all 3 of these products in Woocommerce as well, and you map them to the corresponding products in Breww.
Breww links fully to Woo, so even if you rack all your beer into 12-pack cartons, Breww knows you could theoretically make 6-packs and bottles out of those, so Woo knows how many theorectical smaller items you could create from existing larger stock.
When a sale happens, this automatically pulls through to Breww, and if there aren’t any actual single bottles in stock Breww will automatically “virtually disassemble” a 12 pack to create them and add them to the sale. Any remaining singles will remain in stock for future orders.
Mix-and-match bundles are a bit harder, and you need a separate plugin to handle those. I’ve experimented with a couple but am yet to find one I’m happy with, so this is still a work in progress for us (and so we’re not offering customer-created mixed packs yet).
Hi Nick,
Thanks for raising your question here in the community! I think @cornel-ianculovici covers quite nicely how Breww works with variable products (Thanks, Cornel!); the only other resource you may find helpful is our guide on Known supported & unsupported plugins/addons/extensions for Shopify & WooCommerce, which covers plugins we know have worked but also a small section on mix and match products.
Very cool - didn’t know that list existed. Thanks Connor!
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Thanks for responding to this - really appreciated the detailed response.
Just so I’m clear, are you suggesting in WooCommerce that I have to set up 3 different products for, essentially, the same item? If so, I’m not sure that’ll wash with my client as he wants the e-commerce process to be as simple as possible: one product (ie: Breww IPA) that can be purchased by selecting the pack size.
Single bottles may not be so much of an issue as we’re going to put those in a Build a Box but the multipacks, ideally, need to be a variable product and in order to track inventory, at least in WooCommerce, use some stock multiplier code that enables to deduct the amount of stock when bought in a multipack (if that makes sense).
Or have I got the wrong end of the stick?
For the different pack sizes you’d probably use a single variable product in WC, giving the variations different SKUs (& prices!) and mapping these to different Breww products.
@jon-kyme2 is spot on. You create one variable product in Woo with each variation being the different pack sizes you want to sell (e.g. single, 6x and 12x).
In Breww you create all three products, under the one parent beer, with the correct inventory and assembly/dissasembly instructions, then map these to the 3 variations in Woo.
The customer will see one beer in your online shop, with 3 different size options to add to cart (and you can get various themes, plugins etc. to customise how this looks and feels on your site).
If a customer buys a 6-pack but there are none of these “available” in Breww, then Breww will either “assemble” it from single bottles, or “disassemble” a 12-pack into single bottles and then “assemble” the 6-pack. All of this, along with the relevant inventory, will be handled automatically (as long as you set up the assembly/dissasembly instructions on each product correctly).
If you don’t plan to sell singles then you can skip adding this as a variation to the product in Woo, but you still need them in Breww as your base smallpack product. Then if you use a mix and match plugin in Woo you can use the singles there.