Hello.

I'm not a programmer for a living, but I'm someone who came into our company from a programming background and got a different position. It has been a year or so since I've actively programmed, but I do so on my days off for fun.

At our company we make bookkeeping software, and we recently have expanded onto providing webshops connected to this bookkeeping program. This all works in the cloud. A few of our bigger clients are currently doing a few trial-runs of the shop and lately we have been dealing with a specific shop that is making this a headscratcher.

Our bookkeeping software allows you to add a "Product", which essentially is a specific item within your stock. Every product also has a stock and based on in and out-going invoices the stock adjusts itself to the reality of things. This all works really well.

Our webshop adds an external line of incoming orders that are filled depending on the stock. This works too.

Where the challenge starts is that one of our clients has a clothingstore.

They have variations for both colour and size for every product. They also need to keep track of the stock for each of those variations;

Considering 3 sizes and 3 colours for every piece of clothing, this means 9 possible variations.

The product-list is already at a whopping 500. Currently the only way to safely track stock would be by making one article per variation. This would make the entire stock-program a huge mess.

Our program allows to add special attributes to products. Which we use for a sandwich shop. Order comes in with a specific tag for the sauce.

This is however just treated as 1 sandwich sold and the sauce-tag never leaves the invoices. It can't be attributed a different stock.

So I've been thinking about it here and work. As have a few other people. I was thinking to work with sub-articles connected to a main one. Thing is that these would still make the whole stock-program difficult to use.

Shadows of programming-past may have cornered us in this. We might have to rethink the whole way products are managed to allow for these specific variations.

I'm posting here to see if there's anyone who may be willing to think along with us. Are we not seeing a great big shiny solution?

Note: we work with Java and our databases are MySQL based. I'm not entirely sure how relevant that information is for the question.

I'm sorry if this post is not appropriate here, I didn't want to post in /r/programming and this subreddit was pointed out as a place to pose questions.