When you want to sell a set of products, such as a box of various candies or a set of socks, you need a way to manage the set. Kits let you create sets of products that you can then sell and fulfill. This article covers the technical details of how kit availability is calculated.
Table of Contents
- Calculating How Many Kits Can Be Sold
- How LVK Solves This at Scale
- Realtime and Scheduled Kit Inventory Updates in LVK
- Kit Availability Recap
Calculating How Many Kits Can Be Sold
To understand how this works, let's use an example of a candle gift set. The candle gift set kit contains the following components:
- 1 red candle (200 units available)
- 1 blue candle (500 units available)
- 1 green candle (4,000 units available)
In this case, there are 200 candle gift sets available. This is based on the lowest available number of its components, the red candle with 200 units.
If you sell one of the component products individually, or adjust its inventory, this can affect how many candle gift sets are available. Tracking this manually gets difficult once you're managing multiple kits with several components each.
How LVK Solves This at Scale
LVK makes managing kits easy. In addition to managing your kits, LVK also automatically calculates how many times a kit can be fulfilled based on the inventory of all its components. This matters a lot when selling kits, since you don't want to oversell any of a kit's components.
Because this is automatic, LVK saves you the manual work of managing sets of products, and lets you sell component products individually or as part of other kits.
Realtime and Scheduled Kit Inventory Updates in LVK
Automatically tracking kit availability is technically challenging. The LVK engineering team continually improves how it processes and calculates these availability updates.
LVK currently uses two methods to process inventory updates:
- Realtime: When a product (SKU) is adjusted, LVK publishes its updated availability to any connected store.
- Scheduled: Scheduled tasks run at regular intervals to monitor and publish product changes, keeping connected stores, kits, purchase orders, and inventory in sync.
To balance speed and scale, LVK tracks how fast each SKU sells and adjusts how it processes and publishes updates based on that SKU's availability.
- Realtime updates occur for lower inventory counts.
- Scheduled updates occur for higher inventory counts.
Let's return to the candle gift set example. As a reminder, its components are:
- 1 red candle (200 units available)
- 1 blue candle (500 units available)
- 1 green candle (4,000 units available)
Assume the green candle is also included in 80 other candle gift sets. Recalculating the availability of every one of those sets is process-intensive and takes time. LVK calculates the rate at which each product is selling and determines whether a recalculation of every kit containing that product needs to happen.
Because there are 4,000 green candles, there's minimal risk of overselling them, so real-time updates of the candle gift set's availability aren't necessary. For this high inventory count, LVK calculates kit availability using scheduled updates instead, to save time.
On the other hand, there are far fewer red candles. As soon as the red candle's availability reaches a minimum threshold, LVK recalculates kit availability in real time to avoid overselling.
Kit Availability Recap
To recap, LVK solves the problem of managing sets of products, especially the challenge of managing products contained within multiple sets (what we call kits and components).
LVK balances the complexity of managing availability at scale by using a combination of scheduled and real-time updates, depending on each product's inventory count.