Linked Product Inventory

If you ever need to break out a single Shopify or Squarespace product into a number of different Candid products, to highlight different designs or colorways while still maintaining inventory sync with the original DTC product, consider using Candid’s linked inventory feature.

The process has a few steps but is fairly simple. For the sake of clarity, “channel product” refers to the original product that lives on your DTC e-commerce site (Shopify, Squarespace, etc.) and “linked products” are the new products we’re creating in Candid for each broken-out set of variants:

1. Create the new linked product(s)

In this example, I’m separating the Polo Shirt into its 3 different colors: Red, Green, and Blue.

Linked products only share inventory, not images or other product information, so you’ll want to either re-upload the channel product images or supply new images for the linked products.

2. Create the new linked product options

For now I’m just creating a single set of options to correspond to the original sizes, but these options can be anything you want.

It may be easiest to get one linked product set the way you'd like, in terms of variants and pricing, and then duplicate it for the rest, rather than creating each linked product from scratch:

3. Link each new linked product variant to its corresponding channel product variant

Do this by first searching for and selecting the product under Bulk & Case Pack > Linked Variant > Link A Variant:

Then selecting the variant you want to link to:

4. (Optional) Set the linked quantity

The default relationship between linked & channel variant is 1-to-1, but if for any reason you want the new product to pull, say, a dozen of the channel product for every one linked product added to the Candid order, you’d put 12 here (and optionally call it “dozen” or any other label you’d find helpful, if you want to override the default “12”).

5. Confirm everything looks the way it should

When you navigate to https://app.candidwholesale.com/selling/products-manager?view=inventory you should see the linked product inventory displayed like so:

Note: if you selected a case pack quantity in step 4 above, this number would reflect that (eg, 100 of the channel product would correspond to 8 ct “dozen” packs of the linked product)

6. Finally, publish the products you want to publish

Most likely you’ll want to unpublish the channel products and publish the linked products in their place. (You’re free to do whatever you want, but this is likely the best and least confusing way to do it.)