In this update, Tuomo Laine, CEO of TWICE Commerce, walks you through our latest release focused on connecting your online listings to your physical inventory with unprecedented flexibility. This feature is a game-changer for rental and resale businesses that offer complex bundles or packages.
Whether you are running a bike rental shop, a camera equipment business, or a furniture subscription service, the ability to define granular rules allows you to build packages that match your real-world operations. You can define requirements as vaguely (e.g., "any bike") or as specifically (e.g., "Bike Model X, Size Small") as needed.
TWICE Commerce is the Recommerce OS designed to help you start, grow, and scale your circular business. With these new fulfillment settings, you have total control over how your catalog interacts with your inventory.
💻 Get early access to TWICE Commerce 2.0 through waitlist: https://www.twicecommerce.com/lp/twice-2-0
Tuomo Laine
Hi there, I'm Tuomo Laine, the co-founder and CEO of TWICE Commerce. And today I'm going to showcase you a bit on some of the key things that we have coming out in our new release. And today the first thing that I'm going to showcase is the flexible nature that we have when you're connecting your listings to your inventory.
Tuomo Laine
What I have open here is my demo store where I have set up a quite simple inventory. I have 50 unique bikes listed here, each one of them having their own models and frame sizes, colors and so on. The key thing that in the case of this demo that you probably want to notice is that all of the bikes are categorized either with a small, medium or large frame size. On top of that I have 50 helmets which I do not track unique in an individual unique way as I'm not too concerned on which one of the helmets go out and come in or how much an individual helmet has occurred in costs or income. So I'm just deciding to follow them with a one item code. Whereas with the bikes I want to follow everything on a bike level so that's why they are unique rows in my inventory.
Tuomo Laine
Alright, so then in my online store I want to build a listing like this. So I want to have an offering where I offer someone the ability to book two bikes with two helmets. That starts with 80 euros per day and then I want to allow the user to select for both of the bikes which the kind of the frame size that they want to have. And after that it's a quite basic listing in terms of the descriptions that I have. So today we're going to focus on how might I achieve this kind of listing where I have two bikes, two helmets and I want to be able to say that one of the bikes is one size and the other is another size.
Tuomo Laine
In order to do that, in twice I would go to my catalog and listings and I have already prepared this listing so we can be efficient with our time. So here you can see that I have the same title that I had there in the online store. I have my descriptions, images, my tax rates, all of the basic stuff that I might have. In order to build that variant selection there I've defined two variants. Variant number one being bike number one size where the user can select from three values. And then the same for the bike two size. So if we quickly go back to the online store you see that these then result into these variant selections on the listing page. Currently if I look at the variant, different variant combinations that I might get which is bike number one being small and then bike two small, medium, large. And the same for all of them. My stock availability is saying not applicable because I haven't yet defined any connections to my inventory via fulfillment rules.
Tuomo Laine
So let's look at that and this is really the beef of what we want to showcase today. So in simplicity in twice you can say for any listing that you define that when someone purchases or books this listing, what do I need from my inventory? Let's start with defining the helmets that I need for my listing. So I'm going to go and select items. I'm going to need two of these so I can go and put that into two search for the helmets. I'm going to click on that. Now you can see that twice automatically created a rule that hey the item name needs to be helmet all sizes. As we can see soon this can be a lot more precise if we want it could be referring to an SKU code or anything that you have defined in your inventory. But in this case and for my inventory this is enough. And it already tells me that there's 25 matches in the inventory. You remember that we had 50 helmets why it's 25 is that well for any listing it needs two of those helmets. So essentially I can have maximum 25 bookings at the same time with two helmets. So let me save that.
Tuomo Laine
Great for each one of these rows I can I can also add a label to make the the upcoming rules a little bit more simple. So let me just put that there. Now for my listing I need those two bikes. I could go and say I need two bikes but in that case I would always kind of force both of the bikes to be same kind of bikes. But I wanted to allow the user the ability to say that they want one bike as small and one bike as medium size. So let me just add first one bike. Now if you remember in my inventory I had defined for all of my bikes a attribute called type which I've defined as bike. So when I create this stock item rule I can just go here. I can select type and I can select bike and it automatically finds all of my 50 bikes. As you can see I could have gone to for example item name and there I see all of the different actual bike model names that I have. But in this case and this listing I don't really care what kind of a bike it is. I just want to make sure that the customer gets a bike for the sake of simplicity. So let's say that I need one item with the type bike. Great. Let me repeat that for the other bike. Great. And just to make things a little bit more understandable I'm going to go and right here bike number one and bike number two.
Tuomo Laine
Great. So at this point if I go and check my variants I can see that for each one of these combinations I have 25 stocks available. So that makes sense because for any combination I would need one bike and then another bike. I had a total of 50 bikes so this kind of makes sense. But you might be thinking that hey you haven't yet defined what's the implication when user selects a small, medium or large bike and you're correct. So that's why in twice we have this variant specific rules here. So all of the stock item rows that you've listed here you can find here below and then just define more rules that come into play if the user selects that specific variant. So in this case if the user selects for the bike one, the variant size small, I can just go to the bike one row, open it up and say that all right on top of the base rule that I had defined there the frame size needs to be small. Now I repeat it for the other ones. So if someone selects bike one size medium I want bike one to have frame size medium. And then for large the same. Great.
Tuomo Laine
Now I can repeat these steps for bike two. So when someone selects the bike two, so in this case again reminding you goes to this selection and select small. I'll select that then the bike two needs to be small. And repeating the steps for medium and large. Great. So with quite basic rules and very understandable way I've been able to define what's the implication when someone selects something in on a variant level and it doesn't have to automatically mean that the helmet needs to change in size also. So it's you can go very granular with this.
Tuomo Laine
All right. So now we have our rules in place and if I want to check whether whether they kind of are doing their job, we can always go to the variants and see the maximum availability of any combo that I might set. In order to kind of make sense of this, it might be worthwhile to go quickly back to the inventory and see how many small, medium and large bikes I had defined in the inventory so we can together come back here and see that the numbers match. So going into my inventory, I'm going to just first filter out the helmets or just select only the bike type products. And after that, I'm going to use the group by so I'm going to just group them by the frame size so I quickly get to see the different stock items listed by their frame size. So I can see here that all right I had 16 large bikes in my inventory, 24 medium bikes and 10 small bikes. So 10, 24, 16 going from small, medium to large.
Tuomo Laine
I go back to the catalog and I go to the listing. I remember that we defined the rules here or here. And as I go to the variants, we can kind of always check the stock availability based on the choices that we would make. So first, let's see that if I would kind of on the highest level, it shows me how many of variants, small, medium and large bikes I have. 10, 24 and 16, just like we just checked in the inventory. If I were to select a small bike first, then this number here always tells me the availability of that combination. So small and small, if there's 10 small bikes, those can be booked five times until until that combination can be booked five times until I would run out of inventory. Now, small and medium, why that ends up being then is that even though I have 24 medium bikes, I only have 10 small bikes. So that maximum of that combination is essentially the maximum of small bikes that I would have and the same with large one. So the actual availability works here.
Tuomo Laine
At the end of the day, you don't have to do this kind of auditing. You don't have to kind of understand that's the big thing that the system is doing for you. But sometimes it's handy to understand kind of on the deepest level that what's the kind of at least the theoretical maximum of overlapping bookings that you could have. In this case, medium and large are combination. You can get to even 16 bookings overlapping with medium bikes and that might be interesting for you.
Tuomo Laine
All right, so just a quick recap. In the inventory, you are able to track all of the items individually or in this kind of a grouped way. You can define and we will have a separate video looking into the attributes, but you can define as many attributes as you want. They're in total control by you. Then when you're building your listings, you can in your fulfillment settings, use these attributes as ways of saying what do you need from your inventory. And you can go quite deep in defining what kind of additional rules come into play when a user selects a specific listing on the online store side of things. And all of this same stuff works also for manual orders, which we will again check on another video. I hope this makes sense to you guys. We think that it's a very dynamic way for you to build different kind of packages with the simplicity of not having to think too many things at the same time and being able to just define what you need in a as vague or as granular way as your use case defines to be reasonable. Thanks.