Variants in Inventory Planner are typically created through your connected platforms. However, you may encounter a situation where you need to order products that you will not be selling individually - for example, components of bundles or assemblies.

To manage these situations, you can create an IP variant. IP variants only exist in Inventory Planner.

For example, if you are ordering the raw components of a finished good, the raw component would be the IP variant while the finished good would be the assembly.

IP variants should not be used to create products that will be sold individually on your connected platforms. Any new products to be sold individually should be created on your platform and then synced to Inventory Planner.

To create an IP variant, start with the finished good. For example, if you sell an item in packs of four but need to order the components individually, find the variant for the pack of four in the Replenishment report.

From there, click into its details.

From within the details modal, click into the "Bundles & Production" tab and set the variant to be a bundle or assembly. You'll then have an option to add components, including a new IP variant.

Create a title, SKU, and assign a vendor for this new variant. You can optionally enter the cost price, retail price (useful for calculating retail stock value metrics) and a barcode.

Once you're happy with the details of your IP variant, click "Create and add to bundle". 

Once you've created the IP variant, return to the Replenishment report and click its "Details" icon to set its stock by location in the "Warehouses" tab:

IP variant stock is managed in different ways depending if the variant is linked to a bundle or an assembly.

For bundles, you can tie stock of the component to sales of the bundle. When you click the checkbox to "Manage components stock based on bundles sales", each sale of the bundle will reduce stock of the component by the corresponding amount.

For example, if three units of an IP variant go into each bundle, a bundle sale will reduce stock of the variant by three units.

For assemblies, you will include IP variants on assembly orders. For example, if you purchase Product Z in individual units from your supplier and but sell it on Amazon in packs of two, you may need to assemble the units into a pack by creating an assembly order.

IP variants can only be imported when importing bundle and component relationships using the CSV import functionality in Inventory Planner.

Please see the Importing bundles and assemblies article for more information on how to import IP variants.

If you no longer need an IP variant, you can delete it by looking it up in the Replenishment report and clicking on the Details icon.

From there, click More > IP Variant.

Then click "Remove variant" at the bottom of the modal window.