Components

Components allow you to create dependency relationships between different attribute stock items.

Normally, when a product has multiple stock items associated with it their quantities are used in parallel. But with components you can use stock in series, i.e. one after the other.

Use cases

We've kept this functionality as generic as possible to allow for various use cases, such as:

• Stock of other stock items, e.g. parts/ingredients of assembled inventory or product variants.
• Batches of stock that need to be used in sequence, e.g. Batch B is used only once Batch A has been used up.
• The same stock from different suppliers, e.g. with a relationship like A > B > C, if supplier A has no stock left, then B or C will be used if they have stock. Total product availability is A + B + C.

How does it work?

Let's use a simple example. Imagine you design and sell painted candles. You have 100 stock of plain candles, 10 stock of painted candles with design A and 10 stock of design B.

You can set your plain candle stock as a child component of your painted candle A and painted candle B stock. The effective available stock of painted candle A is now 110, because you can always make more painted candles from your plain candle stock.

You can additionally sell your plain candles as its own product, or you can simply use them as component stock. In the latter case, you don't need to add any attribute match rules to the stock item. Component stock will always apply to its parent stock regardless of match rules or settings like internal stock.