If you manage your inventory with Vend and want to add a Shopify site as a sales channel, you’ve probably seen Vend’s Shopify plugin. It does a great job syncing your online store and physical store inventory. While the Shopify and Vend integration is very simple and useful, it does have its limitations.

Shopify Doesn’t Count Decimals

Vend allows you to add products with decimal quantities. If you see your products based on weight or volume, you may be using that feature. Unfortunately, Shopify tracks whole number quantities only.

Although you may have logged 9.25L of inventory in Vend, Shopify treats each number as a whole unit, rounding to 9x1L products available on your store. Shopify ignores the final 0.25L of your inventory.

If you are a grocery story, butcher or baker, and you sell products by weight, that might not work for you. Shopify rounds all Vend inventory quantities to the nearest whole number. For example, if you have 9.25L of dish soap on Vend, Shopify will say that you have 9x1L bottles of dish soap on your product list.

This results in 2 problems:

• You can’t sell this product in 1/2 or 1/4 L increments, and,

• Your website will show that you’re out of stock when you have some available in store.

The Workaround

Vend allows you to add composite products which is super handy for selling decimal products.

1. Create the product you want to sell, and add its inventory. Let’s call it “Dish Soap” and let’s track the inventory as a Standard Product. Let’s say you have 20.25L. Hit Save.

2. Create a new product, which will be the decimal quantity. Under the name put “0.25L Dish Soap.” Scroll down to inventory and choose “composite product.”

3. Publish to Shopify

In a few moments you should see the product “0.25L Dish Soap” on your Shopify site, with 81 in stock. Great!

Limitations of the Workaround

The solution is not perfect. Unfortunately you can’t combine “products with variants’ and “composite products” on Vend. In our example, if you sell your dish soap with 9 different scents, and in 3 different sizes, you’ll have to make a composite product for each. That’s 27 composite products! If you need a more comprehensive solution, we’d be happy to chat with you about a custom Shopify module.