Inventory: Can someone advise the best way to set things up?

[boomboombrazil]

I am about to embark on a huge endeavor of re-entering my inventory correctly and have some concerns about how to do it. I sell one of a kind bikinis from over 100 different vendors and the prints all vary. I will need to have accurate reports so need to know if I need to enter every single bikini in as a unique item or simply create different skus per style based on varying prints? For instance, the Minicakes bottom comes in 25 different prints right now and they are everchanging. Do I create a unique item for each print or just the one item "Minicake" with 25 skus? And will these skus be able to download in a readable report for inventory purposes? And if I do this, how cumbersome will my instore register app be if I have 10,000 pictures of each style in all the varying prints? Looking forward to your answer!

[Sean]

@boomboombrazil - Hello, and welcome to the Seller Community. I'm happy to help advise. To get going, it sounds like you would be able to create a variant for each vendor - so you wouldn't need to create separate items for each of them. You can still track inventory using variants (but not modifiers). You can assign a unique SKU to each variant, as well. Having said that, you can't assign a photo for each variant, just the main item. Also, please keep in mind it's best to avoid using SKU's with leading 0's, as they get dropped off by most spreadsheet applications. Learn how to enable inventory management.

Please let me know if you have any follow-up questions. 

[jessamineshop]

Hi There, this question/ answer pretain to me as well. My question is, however, if your variants are colours or prints, how can you have an image associated with each item. 

My retail store is yarn and fabric. I want to be able to add a yarn style with the colours as variants; however, I must be able to have a pic for each colour. So is it better to just make each color into an individual item? Thanks!

[Helen]

@jessamineshop It's not possible to add a picture to item variations at this time. So if you really need images then yes you could create a new item for each color (and then you could set different weights as variations). 

However, this might mean you'll have a lot of items to choose from at checkout. You could test out each option a few different yarns and see which set up works better in your store!